How should retailers prepare for a post-pandemic Christmas?
By Barry Flaherty, Head of Strategic Alliances EMEA, Jitterbit
Time’s a funny old thing. Did you feel like it slowed down last year during lockdown? All those hours spent inside Zoom, crafting, baking, or online shopping. You might have felt like the world ground to a halt.
Well... unless you happen to work in e-commerce, in which case the inverse is true. As the world went into lockdown, the e-commerce world went into hypergrowth because of the unprecedented shift to online retail.
The pace of change in the retail industry over the past 18 months is startling, even for a - let’s say ‘seasoned’ - industry stalwart like me. According to a McKinsey study, 10 years of growth was compressed into just three months during 2020.
It’s hard to know what's going on when you’re stuck inside a tornado like that. As the dust now starts to settle and we emerge from the pandemic, there are new challenges and opportunities to be identified.
But those lessons need to be learned fast. Christmas is around the corner and the customer is approaching the festive season with shopping habits reshaped by the experiences of the pandemic and the new e-commerce landscape.
That’s why it’s crucial retailers get their customer experience right this winter. Consumers are looking to retailers with higher expectations than ever before - shaped by the frustrations of last year’s lockdown, fears over product availability and newly set expectations of both the in-store and online experience.
Any failure by retailers to get it right this year could mean the customer relationship starts to feel unfestive very fast, the bottom line takes yet another hit and customer loyalty is irreparably damaged.
Fortunately, I come bearing gifts; gifts in the form of industry knowledge from five tech and innovation leaders at cutting-edge digital agencies and tech companies. They’ve each answered the question, how has the pandemic reshaped the retail industry?
Read on for what they had to say, and for their advice on how retailers should prepare for this customer critical Christmas.
Joey Evans, Partnerships Manager, The Hut Group (THG)
We’re finding a major challenge for online brands right now is having the right support network in place when looking to tackle new and complex markets.
In our experience, we have found that while it is essential to have operations and logistics capabilities accounted for, what is often overlooked is the performance, merchandising, and local knowledge that is essential to see success in complex markets.
Realising where you are strongest a business, and never underestimating how you are supported by local knowledge and trading nuances is also key.
Too often brands want to set up shop in China or South East Asia, and beyond their bonded warehousing and delivery choices, they fall flat when it comes to marketplaces, social and private commerce channels.
In the run up to Christmas, we have seen many in the industry feeling overstretched operationally as a result of the pandemic. The impact on manufacturing, stock levels, and distribution have been particularly acute.
Approaching peak season, these concerns can be amplified ten-fold. It’s crucial to ensure that even the most minute details of your supply chain are accounted for: HS Code determination, prohibited items screening, and denied parties. For international trade, that means your tax and customs and duties too.
Even one wrongly labelled package in a whole metric tonne of airmail can hold up an entire manifest for days at a time, and at great expense. In the run up to Christmas, this becomes even less desirable.
Our end-end fulfilment and delivery services use cutting-edge integration technology to alleviate these issues and to ensure a swift seamless customer experience and Christmas deliveries on time.
Iris Schiefer, Senior Strategic Partnerships Manager, EMEA, BigCommerce
Competing for customer mindshare is a challenge in e-commerce right now. As the online retail market becomes increasingly crowded, many brands have struggled to differentiate and find their niche.
The reason many have failed to do this is because they have an incomplete view of the customer, their buying behaviours, and their purchase journey. It's important to understand who is really buying your product, and why, so you can tailor your offering.
Data silos as a result of legacy and highly customised but poorly integrated systems are often to blame here.
Retailers obviously want to get ahead before Christmas, but evaluating a full tech stack overhaul takes time, effort, and research.
To maximise results this peak season, I'd recommend focusing on a few quick UX wins. Decide these by evaluating your customers' path to purchase: do you have an optimised, one-page checkout that removes blockers to purchase?
Are you offering guest checkout options? Is the call to action (i.e. add to cart/checkout) on your product pages clear, easy to find and optimised for channels like mobile?
Working through these questions will also highlight areas for longer term improvement, which can be worked into 2022 planning and budgets.
Alastair Brodie, Commercial Director, Monsoon Consulting
The global pandemic has presented several digital challenges and opportunities to all organisations.
These include the acceleration of inter-company digital transformation projects (e.g. payment integrations, platform upgrades and migration, security updates, B2B enablement, international and marketplaces), to upskilling the workforce to become more agile and expert in all digital touchpoints.
The reality is, the cross-border, multi-disciplined teams that can work and maximise resources to address and deliver key digital projects will see their long-term vision a reality across their tech stack investment and will be the ones who will reap the ultimate dividends of digital success.
From a retailer perspective, and aside from all the well-documented supply chain and global logistics issues, our recommendation would be around the immediate appraisal of the site's infrastructure, security, and performance.
This season's peak trading period is essentially starting now, so ensure that the core projects in your backlog are prioritised and move to address the key epics around site stability.
In addition, any value-add to differentiate your service/product, perhaps in the manner of a loyalty or rewards scheme can go far in maximising your customer experience and retention.
With Adobe Commerce retailers can take advantage of features like Content Staging and Page Builder to prepare for the many online events in the coming months.
Customer Segmentation along with Product Recommendations present a wonderful opportunity to target specific customer groups.
James Brown, Director, 4Roads
Social platforms, from Instagram to Snapchat, want to retain and sell to their captive audience. With whole transactions taking place natively, we’re now confronted with an entirely new set of marketplaces and retailers.
The message from young consumers is clear: if you want to secure a slice of their wallets, you need to be ready for social commerce.
Although associated with social platforms, the term social commerce started much earlier. Yahoo initially coined it in 2008, before it really began to take hold when brands started to notice customers changing behaviour and built branded communities to interact and share information.
We only have to look at highly successful brands like Airbnb and Lego to see the success that they are enjoying by putting communities front and centre while successfully weaving in sophisticated commerce functionality.
Lindsay Hampson, VP Marketing, eBridge
The e-commerce boom we’ve witnessed during the pandemic has created volume surges for merchants and suppliers across their web stores - a trend that forced many traditional businesses to throw up a website in a hurry so they could serve their in-store faithful while they were forced to close.
The problem of data has now reared its ugly head for these businesses, and along with it a number of questions.
How should they connect disparate systems, like an e-commerce webstore and your older back office ERP or accounting system? What’s the best way to keep up with orders and get data right between systems, and fast?
The experience and knowledge of the domain experts at Jitterbit and eBridge Connections (a Jitterbit company) has helped many avoid common integration mistakes, like trying to do too much at once, trying to replicate older systems, or working with unreliable data, and has proved incredibly vital in this period.
To sum up
So there you have it, five key insights straight from innovators working at the e-commerce coalface:
1. Integrate your disparate systems
2. Eliminate those data silos
3. Run an appraisal of your site's infrastructure, security, and performance
4. Evaluate your customers’ path to purchase and focus on a few quick UX wins
5. Think native social transactions and weave in sophisticated commerce functionality
6. Deploy cutting-edge integration tech to automate end-to-end fulfilment and delivery services for a swift, seamless customer experience.
I predict those retailers who’ve been good and ticked off these actions on their list will be rewarded by their customers. Those who haven’t might find their stocking empty this post-pandemic Christmas.
