In the United States, ecommerce accounts for 8.5% of total revenues in retail, according to the most recent Census Bureau data. Experts expect online sales to continue rising, with Forrester predicting that ecommerce’s average annual growth rate of 9.32% will hold steady through 2020.
If you want to make the most of your brand’s presence online, however, you have to be active on, and optimized for, multiple channels. Price comparison engines, social commerce options, mobile apps, multi-site product aggregators and marketplace platforms are all enormous drivers of sales. The 18 largest marketplaces alone account for some 44% of the world’s ecommerce sales, according to data from Digital Commerce 360.
But none of this matters if your brand can’t provide a consistent, unified customer experience across all those of those channels. Keeping it all in sync is hard from many perspectives, including order fulfillment, branding assets, product information, shipping logistics and inventory management.
Trying to do it all alone, or even with a dedicated team, can spread merchants too thin. These tools can help.