A fundamental goal that has remained constant for marketing and sales is to make the customer’s path to purchase as convenient as possible. According to Smart Insights, “97% of consumers have abandoned a purchase because the service wasn’t convenient enough, showing that e-commerce needs to compete on more than price.” With progressive advances in business and technology, retailers are making it more and more convenient for customers to access products and services than ever before.
From the birth of the first convenience store in 1927 to online retailers and advanced delivery services, businesses have adjusted their retail model to compete for customers by simplifying the path of purchase. A decade ago, the emphasis to gain data to personalize the customer experience was gathered through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then, a mobile-first strategy, and now, social media analytics. The main purpose of these strategies is to get closer to the consumer.
One of the most exciting approaches in recent years is distributed commerce; it promises so much convenience for the customer that it has been dubbed “the future of eCommerce.” Let’s explain the concept of distributed commerce first and explore how it has been changing the eCommerce game in the last couple of years.
According to HubSpot, “82% [of consumers] rated an immediate response as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ when they were looking to buy from a company.” This inconvenience of leaving the original app can be eliminated with distributed commerce.
With distributed commerce, the retailer goes directly to the customers by partnering with other brands such as, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Facebook, or Pinterest, which allow the customers the opportunity to purchase on the channel they are already using.
Distributed commerce is ideal to accommodate these trends due to its ability to create a frictionless commerce experience for the customer. There are a few areas we expect to see the most significant impact of distributed commerce in the coming years. These include areas such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, AI, virtual assistants, and even neural computer interfaces. Distributed commerce will integrate with these new advances in online shopping to provide continuous convenience to the customer.
Due to the high cost of customer acquisitions and low attention span, distributed commerce is widely seen as the new frontier for eCommerce transactions. Brands and retailers who remain competitive in eCommerce are the ones who position themselves to benefit from the new realities of distributed commerce alternatives.
At Nisum, we help clients remove boundaries where the product meets the customer on whatever platform they are. With the rapid digital transformation in retail and eCommerce, we are proud to establish unified digital commerce experiences for our clients so that they can reach a broader audience. We facilitate innovation, understanding business requirements, and optimizing the emerging technologies to yield sufficient results. We develop next-generation solutions like machine learning and AI that would help them solve business challenges and deliver more value to their customers. To learn more about our services, contact us.