E-Commerce Answers

Well that was a doozy of a first quarter! While pandemic and political news continued to send shockwaves through our newsfeeds, e-commerce kept chugging along fueled by pandemic fatigue-driven buying and the anticipation of more stimulus checks. Lockdowns are ending and in-person retail is picking up but wary consumers are still using e-commerce sites and apps to buy online and pick up in-person. E-commerce sectors related to housing, outdoor gear, sporting goods, marine / boating, home furnishings and specialty foods continue to set record sales numbers so long as supply chains are moving.

Those of us working in e-commerce are primed for the best of both worlds, with an economic recovery, pent-up demand and the return of shopping in-person and travel are on the horizon. At Accorin, we set up clients on what we call our “Big 3” e-commerce platforms: Adobe Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify. We’re going to kickoff the quarter with some quick news on each of these platforms and some helpful links that will help you explore more about each or all of them should you choose to dig deeper. Of course if you have any questions you can also drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll respond with an answer, our POV, or both!

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Yes, that’s the name. Deal with it. It’s a good thing. Magento and Adobe continue to deliver on their promise of continuing the integration between Magento Commerce and other products within the Adobe Experience Cloud suite. Adobe Summit is happening at the end of this month (sign up now – we doubt you’ll ever get free access to these resources again – take advantage while it’s still virtual) and assuming you sign up for the commerce track, you will no doubt be exposed to a product roadmap that has incentives for merchant teams to consider.

With a number of our B2B clients running Magento 2.x we are excited about the rapid pace of continued development and releases that benefit B2B merchants. The core B2B feature enhancements that were released last year related to purchase order approvals and company customer integrations have been further enhanced. B2B merchants that serve complex organizations with multiple locations and different teams of purchasers will like the current release (2.4.1). This release includes what Magento is calling B2B v1.3.0. According to Magento, “This release includes improvements to order approvals, shipping methods, shopping cart, and logging of admin actions.” Complete details are available here (also a great place to follow future releases).

We’re very excited about some new features related to B2B payments and search that are going to be announced soon and released in Q2. In particular one incredibly innovative integration with a part of the Adobe Suite of B2B-centric products that we especially love because it enhances our “Self Service B2B E-commerce” framework that we continue to evolve with our key B2B merchant clients. Stay tuned for more on this or follow us on twitter at @accorin_agency and you will be alerted as soon as we can release more information about this.

Other key initiatives we’re watching from Adobe / Magento include:

Continued integration with Adobe Sensei for deeper, better personalization

Continued integration with Marketo that will support data-driven merchandising

Large and continuous flow of performance enhancements as evidenced by the dev docs!

BigCommerce

BigCommerce continues to build momentum as a SaaS e-commerce platform in both the B2C and B2B sectors as they expand their offerings through features and integrated 3rd party applications. Some of the biggest news from Q1 includes:

an announcement in February that sellers can integrate their stores with Walmart’s marketplace with an offer as well: “BigCommerce sellers will receive an expedited application review to get up and running on the marketplace quickly, and for a limited time, Walmart will offer $0 commission rates to new platform sellers when they meet all New-Seller Savi...

Let’s talk e-commerce conversion rate. Conversion rate is one of the critical data points any e-commerce merchant should be keeping an eye on, and working hard to increate – hence, conversion rate optimization (CRO). It’s easy to focus solely on getting traffic to your e-commerce website, using SEO, advertising campaigns, etc. But if you have a high traffic/low conversion rate situation, it’s likely that you won’t be very happy with your sales volumes. Ideally, though some relatively easy to implement CRO techniques, you’ll find yourself with a high traffic/high conversion e-commerce business.

First, it’s vital to understand how to calculate your conversion rate:

Take the number of conversions divided by the number of unique visitor sessions – usually expressed as a percentage.

Chances are it’s one of many metrics you are tracking as an e-commerce merchant. It’s a website-centric metric and depending upon how your business is structured it can be used across other channels as well. CRO is the practice of improving your conversion rate by ensuring that any and all impediments to purchase are removed or minimized. The challenge is this list of impediments can be very long and merchants don’t always have control over all of them. The purpose of this article is to provide a list of what we believe are the top 5 data-driven CRO techniques that are not very difficult to implement and typically have significant and immediate improvement in conversion if they are implemented properly.

1. Shopping Cart Items Should Always Be Visible

…(or very easily accessible)

Just like in the physical retail world, in the e-commerce world buyers want to know what’s in their cart at all times. Ideally these items are visible or very easily accessible. Consumers in particular tend to keep a mental note of what they’ve added to their cart so continuous confirmation of it leads a consumer towards completing the purchase.

There are obviously a number of ways to do this depending upon the platform, the theme, and the design of the experience. It can’t be a mystery to find cart contents no matter how rich the UX is and ideally it’s visible. At a minimum make sure you indicate to the user a cart icon with the number of items in it. Like a shopper wandering around a grocery store without a cart – online shoppers are much more likely to abandon their cart if they have to find what they’ve already selected by clicking around.

2. Abandoned Cart Messages Must Contain Cart Items

Many merchants have learned to send messages to users that have abandoned carts during checkout (we discussed this as part of a recent blog post), however it’s surprising how many merchants don’t bother to include the items that were in the cart in the message. Once again the data isn’t always that easy to convert into the message but platforms like BigCommerce/Shopify and ESPs like Klaviyo make it easy – in the case of each it’s a matter of inserting a simple line of code (provided by the platform) then formatting and testing the message in order to get that data in the messages. The performance of your abandoned cart messages is going to improve dramatically if you include items that were in the user’s cart rather than just shooting off a casual message like “Hey you forgot something!”

3. Simplify the Checkout Process

If your conversion rate is less than 1.5%, try purchasing something from your website to truly experience what a customer feels in that checkout process. Is it cumbersome? Is it unintuitive? Is it painful on a mobile device? Is there a “guest checkout” option for those that just want to get in and out? Is it a multiple “page” process?

These are important questions to ask in analyzing the checkout in an effort to simplify it. Many times simplification can be achieved with layout changes and using the shoppers data to pre-fill parts of the necessary forms. Ensuring that users who have an account stay logged in means the session can capture account data and move a shopper a...

Premier Hydro is a successful business in the hydroponics supply space. They are based out of suburban Detroit Michigan. The owner has been running a successful retail operation for over a decade and online sales for the last five years. The merchant has successfully developed a clientele of consumers and businesses. The retail store is located in a high traffic location and together with its online sales this is a successful regional omnichannel business. However the owner found that online sales were not growing as rapidly as retail even during the pandemic. His original online store was set up with Magento before Accorin became involved. After performing a routine technical audit of the basic configurations we worked with the merchant to identify ways we could make the site easier to use for the customers and easier to manage for the merchant. Our analysis pointed us in the direction of overall simplification.

Together we decided that given the simplicity of the business and the minimal number of price rules in the catalog, it would be best to move the merchant from Magento to BigCommerce. The merchant was not using nearly as many of the discrete features and functionalities that Magento offered and that were originally installed. As the business had grown it had become more simple with less reliance on different pricing features and different types of promotional functionalities. It was essentially a B2C business with a simple catalog and some customer-specific prices. Also, considering the variety of people and skills working on both retail and online we felt that a move to a SaaS platform with an simpler admin interface would be better. The migration only took 5-6 weeks during the holidays and the business is now beginning to grow. The merchant now also feels like they have control of the e-commerce operation. Here’s why:

1. BigCommerce is a SaaS Platform

The merchant does not need to worry about hosting infrastructure and security. The merchant does not need to worry about a roadmap for e-commerce development. The merchant doesn’t need to worry about performance. The operation is consistent and given the overall simplicity of the business, BigCommerce is a great match. That doesn’t mean that the merchant feels locked into simplicity, they know that with BigCommerce’s API-first architecture they have the flexibility to connect apps and 3rd party software easily if and when they need to add functionality in the future.

Simple B2B2C

The business and the catalog are relatively simple. Although there are B2B buyers using the site with some specific purchasing needs the pricing rules related to those customers are simple and there isn’t a need for the more robust b2b features that come with Magento Commerce. If needed, simple rules relating to price tiers for B2B sales can be handled easily by BigCommerce. Premier Hydro can also implement Accorin’s Big Commerce app, Group Auto Assign, which would take care of a number of the quasi-B2B use cases that the merchant needs to solve for.

Easy to Use Admin within BigCommerce

The Magento admin interface is extremely powerful and has a lot of features but the merchant was using very few of them. The simplicity and usability of the BigCommerce admin interface allows a number of different employees with different skills who work both retail and online to make changes to the website as needed and to fulfill orders that come in with very basic training. BigCommerce may have fewer out of the box B2B features than Magento Commerce but for this merchant those are distant requirements in light of the simplicity the company currently needs in their operation.

Easy International Expansion

The business is located a few miles from Canada, so the merchant has sights set on cross-border growth – which is common in the border corridor of this part of Michigan. BigCommerce makes that easy — accepting payments globally from more than 65 payment gateways, including Amazon Pay, PayPal and Square, and...

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As an e-commerce agency we focus on helping a lot of B2C and B2B clients move beyond the basics of an e-commerce website to transform their e-commerce systems to really help move the business in a positive direction. That means more than just having simple bells and whistles in a product catalog and shopping cart. E-commerce conversion rates are only 1-2% for a reason…consumers have a lot of choice and they are only one click away from your competitors so that’s why there’s such a huge focus now on data-driven experiences that can increase the chances of the customer converting and purchasing.

This is the first in a series of insights about how we work with merchants to achieve truly data-driven e-commerce experiences, with a focus on the basics. For experienced e-commerce merchants this is a check list. But let’s first provide a definition of what data-driven e-commerce really is because it’s important for merchants and their teams to understand the concept without putting it off as a “black box” of algorithms.

Data-driven e-commerce uses anonymous and general user behavior data to control and / or optimize user experiences to promote the chances of a user behaving in a particular way.

With this definition in mind let’s look at the basics of data-driven e-commerce and the “must-haves” for achieving higher levels of UX control and optimization that will lead to higher conversion. Some of these may have people thinking, “that’s really not a data-driven or machine learning thing” but in fact all of these are. The trick is for merchants to not only install these basic data-driven UX features but to actually pay attention to them, adjust them as needed and harvest the uptick in repeat traffic and conversion that can come from them.

1. Abandonment Messaging

“Abandoned Cart Messaging / Abandon Browse Messaging”

This allows you to send messages to site visitors that have abandoned a shopping cart, or in the case of “abandon browse” messaging send a custom message to visitors that have viewed certain pages or content.

Recovery of cart abandonment is almost an industry in of itself. If merchants can recover even a tiny percentage of their abandoned cart value, their bottom line increases are likely to be significant, compared to the work it takes to implement these abandoned cart messaging.

What Data/How Does it Work?

You need to know that they’ve added items to a cart and / or viewed specific pages. You also need a target email or phone number so you can send them a message. Most people reading this have experienced abandoned cart messages as consumers; the more sophisticated shoppers have probably tried ‘gaming’ abandoned cart messages to get offers out of a merchant. Email Service Provider (ESP) platforms like Klaviyo, Mailchimp and Salesforce Pardot (and any other worth their salt) make setting up this type of messaging relatively easy in that you can use a web-based interface to set up the flows and “if-then” requirements of your messaging. Some e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, have abandoned cart notifications built in to their core platform.

For example, a typical abandoned cart “flow” within the popular e-commerce ESP Klaviyo allows a merchant to

a. Send a message with contents of the cart 1 hour after abandonment of checkout (assumes they left an email before abandoning or they are an existing customer)

b. Send a series of messages (text or email) N days after the first message. The same type of “flow” can be set up for “abandon browse” to target and message site visitors that look at specific pages or products – this of course will only work if you have their email or phone number (assuming your ESP like Klaviyo has a text messaging option)

These types of messages only work as well as the strategy that supports them. Optimizing the message for your business means considering the focus of the message (product, contents of cart, offer) the timing and the frequency. Larger e-commerce merchants have teams of personnel dedic...

Figure 1: an example retail customer company with many buying roles facilitated for Self-Service by Magento 2

(a platform agnostic spin on self service B2B Vs. the Oct ‘20 version which was Magento-focused)

B2B procurement professionals are looking for increasing sophistication and ease-of-use when interacting with their vendors. In many cases they are doing much more online purchasing, much less by telephone and EDI and more by smartphone tapping and scrolling as their choices increase and as their use of B2B e-commerce features and functionalities increase. For example:

Construction Managers and Contractors ordering equipments, supplies and more from a remote job site outside of an office

Retail store workers ordering inventory from the store floor or warehouse

Spa managers ordering health and beauty supplies

Hospital managers ordering and re-ordering supplies from secure medical storage facilities

In order to keep B2B customers, many of which are companies with multiple buyers, returning and buying from your e-commerce website in greater numbers, it’s important to consider and execute a “Self-Service B2B E-Commerce” model. This can be accomplished by merchants at basic and complex levels in e-commerce depending upon the platform, the technology and the user experience that they are planning on designing. This blog post quickly summarizes a range of features from basic to complex that B2B merchants should work towards as they adopt a self-service model for their customers.

Remember, B2B customers are looking for B2C-like e-commerce features – ultimately they want similar experiences even if they’re shopping and buying online as a part of their “day job.”

The Basic Features of B2B Self Service E-Commerce

B2B is different and in order for the merchant to make an e-commerce site more or less “self-service”, it needs more than a unique login, a detailed catalog and a way to checkout. It needs to give customers the functionality to conduct business as their business – with the benefits and functional requirements that a company typically has when it transacts business with another company. Some of these basic requirements include:

Different prices for different customers – “price tiers”

Different discounts for different customers

An ability to generate and share a “quote” with accurate, account-specific pricing and availability

Multiple sub-account log ins for each B2B account – this allows multiple buyers to use the same commercial account

An ability to transact “on account” without a credit card

An ability to reference purchase order or customer number as a part of creating an order

An ability to review and order from past orders

An ability to see reports on purchasing activity by account and sub-account

Associating sales reps with account activity

Associating different shipping rules with different accounts

Limiting the catalog availability by account – at a minimum by category

These are really the basics of functionality that a B2B merchant must provide in order to give their customers the confidence to serve themselves. Accorin has worked with a number of platforms including Big Commerce, Magento CE, and others to enable these types of self-service scenarios for its clients. Some of these B2B features come “out-of-the-box” on the most popular e-commerce platforms, some require extensions and plugins. As a part of a planning phase prior to developing a new e-commerce website, it’s best to map out the requirements and the source of the functionality prior to proceeding.

More Complex Functional Use Cases That Serve More Complex B2B Buyers

Beyond the basics, larger, more complex B2B businesses need greater sophistication and a vast array or features in order to give their customers that true sense of “self-service.” Setting up these features and making them work with all of the integrations that are typically required in a B2B setup can still require significant effort. It can also be frustrating to set it up differently for ...

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Shopify will continue to be a dominant force in 2021 e-commerce and it will remain the launching pad for many startups and entrepreneurs looking to compete in e-commerce due to its cost, stability, and ease of use. But the folks at Shopify are not satisfied with being a leader for small businesses. They have continued to attract larger businesses with Shopify Plus (dedicated support team, staging services and more) and the ability to add features, functionality and unique experiences. With the cash and the established brand there’s no doubt Shopify will look to solidify its leadership among the SaaS platforms while still looking to shed a fading reputation that it’s not flexible for the mid market and enterprise. Clearly it is because many large retailers and merchants are using it. Here are the features we see merchants leveraging in 2021 and the e-commerce trends we think the Shopify roadmap will look to exploit this year.

Conversational Commerce and Explosion of “Ping” Usage

Shopify recognizes that social conversations, texting, and product recommendations are all coming together as a part of customer experience and so they developed Ping and easy-to-use messaging app that allows merchants to easily talk with their consumers. Ping really took off during the pandemic in support of e-commerce and contact-less experiences and it is poised to be adopted with exponential growth in 2021. The stats around its growth are pretty amazing, per Shopify’s growth report.

From March 16 to July 1, interactions between customers and merchants increased by 85% on Shopify Ping (compared to the same time period prior). Conversational commerce is driving genuine connection with customers–and sales.

From March 16 to July 1, the number of merchants using Shopify Ping to engage with their customers increased by 72%.

Sales attributed to chat increased by 185% during the same time period.

Selling in China with Alipay

Alipay is available on other platforms but is a recent addition to the Shopify infrastructure. For this reason it will provide merchandising and selling capability to smaller businesses and niche brands that want to sell overseas in places like China. It will be an easy growth play for many B2C merchants and and brands with D2C opportunity to expect it to grow and to have very high adoption this year.

For more details, check out what Shopify has to say about the partnership.

Social Commerce: Branded Facebook Shops

For Shopify merchants that support their online sales with digital marketing and awareness building using targeted facebook / Instagram this feature is a no brainer. It’s a social headless play and allows for easy seamless merchandising between the ad and product information without leaving Facebook. Look for increasing adoption as merchants and consumers expect more seamless merchandising on social platforms.

Better Checkout – More Innovation in 2021

Shopify solved its checkout problems recently by allowing customization of the cart and checkout experience. Continuing innovation with Shopify Checkout (like subscriptions and post purchase up-sells) will enable it to have rich checkout experiences like its competitors and more custom cloud platforms. Shopify has the most data of any SaaS platform – it will allow merchants to tap into that data and customize checkout in a way that continues to increase total cart value…and it has all the incentive in the world to do so given how it charges.

Experience Design Polaris Adoption

Bigger, bolder designs beyond the Shopify base themes with Polaris and support for GraphQL API. Innovative brand experience designers will be able to push the limits of interactive merchandising. Integrating “try on” and “see what it looks like” apps into the UI and product pages will be easier with additional flexibility provided by tGraphQL. Ihttps://polaris.shopify.com/resources/graphql-api#navigation

Subscription Enhancements

In October 2020, Shopify announced the first APIs and tooling that enable pa...

The cat’s out of the bag; Big Commerce is a major player that is going to push Adobe upstream and Shopify downstream and possibly even some of the bigger enterprise players at the top. They went public last fall, in the middle of the pandemic and CEO Brent Bellm declared after the bell rang that, “with the proceeds from our IPO, we look forward to further investing in the research and development of our platform. We will continue to innovate our product and service with the goal of powering your e-commerce prosperity.”

As a recently-minted member of their solution partner program, we at Accorin currently position Big Commerce as a viable alternative for many types of businesses including B2C and B2B merchants. We love the idea of putting mid-market B2B, and B2C e-commerce merchants that need to move quickly and have simple to medium complexity in their catalogs on Big Commerce. We also like putting B2C startups on Big Commerce, especially if they have aspirations to expand quickly overseas and with multiple brands. We expect to see Big Commerce announce one or two new architectural shifts or feature announcements in 2021, while also pushing its merchants to leverage recently added features from 2019 and 2020 as their user base expands.

Here are several Big Commerce features or noteworthy enhancement we see merchants taking advantage of in greater numbers this year:

Multi-Store

Big Commerce has announced the availability of “multi-store” functionality that will allow merchants to operate multiple storefronts from one instance of Big Commerce. This is a significant achievement and a big draw for a SaaS platform targeting mid-market merchants – especially merchants with multi brand aspirations. Magento, of course has offered multi-store architecture for years – and it is still the leader. But by offering muti-store from a SaaS platform Big Commerce is serving notice that it wants to service merchants with multi-store requirements but that don’t have the same level of complexity as Magento merchants.

It’s likely merchants that are expanding into multi-store requirements will and should explore both Magento and Big Commerce so they invest in the platform that provides the right fit for both current and future needs. The December Big Commerce “Town Hall” mentioned that the feature is now in Beta test, so we are expecting it to be available soon – we’re just not sure when.

Headless Support for CMS Platforms

Big Commerce is going big on headless and given the flexibility of its front end, and its commitment to supporting CMSs of all shapes and sizes its not surprising that it will no doubt announce more pre-baked integrations this year. Currently BigCommerce’s pre-built integrations and starter apps include, but are not limited to:

WordPress

Drupal

Deity

Falcon

Bloomreach

Sitecore

Gatsby

Adobe Exp Manager

Next.js

We anticipate this list will grow in 2021, so merchants that have complex and unique user experience demands, and a CMS / website that already serves those requirements would do well to investigate Big Commerce as a platform for supporting growth in 2021.

B2B Features – Mobile

According to Big Commerce, 61% of their B2B merchant customers conduct transactions using phones. The integration of B2B features at Big Commerce is now mature and the feature set is robust enough for many mid market B2B companies. Customer groups, pricing tiers, pricing flexibility, login-to-purchase and other basic B2B requirements are ready for merchants “out-of-the-box” and there are numerous other great applications that can be plugged in or integrated with ease (read more about them, here. However, given the increasing adoption of mobile purchasing by end customers in B2B, leveraging the overall performance of the Big Commerce SaaS platform and its flexible front-end mobile themes will be the area of greatest benefit in 2021 for these merchants. Mid-market B2B merchants – especially those with any complexit...