E-Commerce Answers

Adobe Magento will remain a worldwide leading e-commerce platform in 2021 but as its ownership by Adobe deepens so will the integrations with other aspects of the Adobe experience cloud platform. There is no question that for larger enterprises ($1b revenue and higher), the Adobe experience suite provides a powerful platform for managing customer experience and growth. The challenge for Adobe will be whether it can bring mid-market companies into the Adobe suite by way of Magento, and will the mid-market willingly and confidently move away from other platforms to immerse themselves in the Adobe way.

The value proposition that Adobe brings in 2021 is clear and rational, especially for omni-channel enterprises with in-person, retail, and e-commerce stores in a number of different countries. But even for mid-market firms – both B2C and B2B – that are looking to focus more on their e-commerce growth in 2021 (perhaps at the slight sacrifice of their other channels), Magento is going to provide a growth platform with features that allow merchants to get some of the benefits and features of the larger Adobe suite. Some of these features may come at added cost, but they will give many merchants in competitive industries the tools to grow and beat their competition this year.

Here are 3 Magento e-commerce features that will allow mid-market merchants to stand out this year. While these have been available since Q3 2020, 2021 is the year we see merchants picking Magento for these three feature-specific reasons. These are not available in the free Community Edition of Magento.

1. B2B Selling Features and Self-Service E-Commerce

Magento Commerce 2.4 (both on prem and Cloud). Magento allows B2B merchants to set up what essentially amounts to a self-service procurement system where a merchant can automate purchasing activity for company customers; no matter how many users purchase from that organization. Magento provides unlimited price and customer group rules, and provides merchants with the ability to set up hierarchies of users with permissions that match the contracts that they have with their customers – including purchase order approvals, custom address books and much more. We call this framework B2B Self-Service E-Commerce, and it’s perfect for a merchant that sells products to retail chains, buyers with complex organizations, global offices and many different roles and people that need access to purchasing. Being able to handle these levels of complexity not only automates processes that used to be manual and time-intensive, it also removes barriers to purchasing that will inevitably increase revenue

2. Data-Driven and AI-Powered Personalization

Magento and Adobe Sensei. No more guessing and product upsells, cross-sells and recommendations. Data can drive those decisions and presentations with the Product recommendation module and Adobe Sensei. Adobe Sensei computes product affinities based on production shopper behavior like product views, products added to a cart, and checkouts. This means that with the new Magento product recommendations engine AND Adobe Sensei, catalog data will learn and evolve continuously. Recommendations and product presentations will therefore be much more personalized and accurate. The ramifications for faster growth are dramatic and in 2021. We believe many Magento (Commerce and Cloud) customers will adopt and deploy them.

3. Great Mobile Experiences and the PWA Studio

This is the year B2B merchants will widely adopt a Mobile or PWA-centric approach to revitalizing their e-commerce. B2B e-commerce is already competitive – even within Amazon – so convenience, speed, and accessibility will be key drivers in determining the volume of business customer usage. This is the year that B2B e-commerce merchants will see mobile transaction rates top 50%. People will be traveling, in the field, and ordering from outside their office again...at a really rapid rate. Smart B2B merchants will revitali...

2020 was a big year for e-commerce. Depending upon the source you look at, it’s easy to find data indicating we experienced 8-12 years of e-commerce growth in just a few short months. Some industries thrived in the need to adopt and evolve e-commerce quickly this year, others were challenged by it. There were winners (those that adopted, invested, and evolved their e-commerce) and there were losers (those that did nothing or simply decided to maintain the status quo.) Our hypothesis is that 2021 is going to be similarly challenging for e-commerce merchants. There will be those merchants that capitalize on continued growth by investing in it properly and those that don’t.

B2C merchants will be faced with evolving the shopping experience to match the most innovative upstarts and brands with creative horsepower. B2B merchants will be faced with keeping their customers happy and maintaining loyalty as their customers explore marketplaces and direct buying options that can threaten their livelihood. As the pandemic ends e-commerce resources will be stretched as merchants look to modify and evolve online shopping to meet or exceed the expectations of in-person shopping. Given this backdrop and the uncertainty around when “normal” will return, here are 5 trends the Accorin team believes merchants will want to adopt as the year progresses:

1. The demise of the plain old “catalog” website and the “shopping cart” checkout

Many more merchants, including B2B merchants will enable seamless shopping and purchasing from different experiences that are outside of a website “catalog.” We all purchased consumer goods off of Instagram in the last couple of years and that trend will continue to grow across multiple social platforms and other types of sites. Shoppers want continued personalization and convenience and that means mixing in-person, e-commerce, and social shopping together in ways that make shopping intuitive, natural and fun. E-commerce will be as complex as ever behind the scenes with complex integrations, architectures, security requirements and complex dev ops. But consumer will want more of the following types of experiences:

Instagram product tease → learn more video → shop the details and prices→ purchase on phone

Text message that it’s time to ship your refill “Do You Want it?” text “YES” to confirm

Google search for outdoor heater→ several retailers explored→ Instagram ad implores shopper to “pick this up curbside today – prices increase in 3 days!” to the user who shopped but then moved on

An industrial purchaser who is googling product is greeted with an offer and product video presented from the most recent merchant that they visited. They watch the video and and receive an offer / discount code and tap “yes” to enroll

A procurement manager for a construction firm that has conducted significant heavy equipment research received an offer from a cable and electrical supply vendor and they make a purchase – even though they had not googled for those products on this computer.

2. Continued Meteoric Mobile and PWA Growth

Over the last two years most B2C merchants watched their “percent of transactions from smart phones” move from below to well above 50%. This is going to continue in B2C as well as more sophisticated B2B buying experiences enable more self-service purchasing from field operations, factory floors and voice commands while driving.

3. Headless, and the Growth of Content-Based Merchandising, even for B2B

For B2C the content and the stories that show how merchandise is used will continue to be the driving force of UX innovation. For B2B the experiences are going to evolve outside of the catalog and shopping cart to a place where customers can self-service “sales demos” with rich experiences. The continuing evolution of UX and merchandising will mean that headless platforms will evolve to service the very unique needs of B2B brands as well, not just B2C. How?

B2B sites will guide buyers thr...

As we enter the new year, Frank is joined by other members of the Accorin team to discuss the impact and observations of the Covid 19 pandemic on their personal lives, working environment and our e-commerce clients.

Given the rapid growth of e-commerce’s during the Covid-19 pandemic, much of it at the expense of retail store visits, there was some skepticism and debate around whether or not new revenue records would be broken during the “Cyber 5” holiday shopping days, which run from Black Friday through to Giving Tuesday. Well, the initial returns are in and records were still broken despite the Pandemic’s impact on the seasonality of e-commerce spending. Here are the key stats and the sources that the Accorin team believes are the most important so far. And look out 2021; it’s going to be another crazy growth year for e-commerce no matter when we all get vaccinated.

First, From ABC News:

Black Friday hit a new total sales (online and retail) record with consumers spending $9b- an increase of 21.6% year over year

On the retail side, in-store and curbside pickup increased 52% on Black Friday

Large retailers saw 403% increase in sales the past two days over the October daily average – physical store visits were way up compared to earlier in the pandemic.

SOURCE:

Digital Commerce 360 Provided some other interesting details:

There were digital traffic jams with all of this activity: “50 major e-commerce sites experienced major delays or outages on the BF/CM weekend”

U.S. shoppers spent a record $34.36 billion on retail websites over the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, up from $28.49 billion for the same period last year.

Digital revenue missed projections as more shoppers heeded retailer warnings to shop earlier to avoid out-of-stock items or shipping delays and took advantage of pre-Thanksgiving discounts.

SOURCE:

Shopify

On November 27 Shopify tweeted: “Shopify merchants currently fluctuating between $1.5-3.5M in sales per minute (16K+ orders per minute).”

Congratulations to Shopify. They’ve made watching e-commerce activity monitoring a true spectator sport with their datastories.shopify.com live experience over the Cyber 5 weekend. If you missed it check the Shopify Developers twitter account

They had this cool, 3D live data stream indicating locations of orders and volume in real time. Around the world.

Global sales set records (Shopify Tweet, Dec 3):

Most importantly Shopify is touting that their merchants were up 76% over the 2019 holiday. An important distinction here is that Shopify looks at the “season” which began November 12 – much earlier than Black Friday.

For more great details and stats from Shopify, go here.

Retailware (Twitter)

In-store retail traffic on Black Friday was down 52% Black Friday ecomm sales were up 22%

Cyber Monday sales were up 15%

SOURCE:

Forbes

Forbes reported that Cyber Monday had a 15.1% increase over last year with $10.8 billion for the day. According to Adobe, the total season-to date holiday spending, including Cyber Monday, is over the $100 billion threshold. This milestone is usually not reached until mid-December. This was written on December 2.

$106.5 billion: season-to-date online spending (up 27.7% from last year)

30%: the growth of curbside pickup year-over-year on Cyber Monday. 23.9%: sales decline in brick and mortar retailers.

SOURCE:

And Last but Not Least, Amazon

Amazon’s take is always as the true marketplace for small businesses – “Amazon customers also made Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best-ever for independent businesses selling on Amazon—nearly all of which are small and medium-sized businesses— with worldwide sales growing over 60% year-over-year.”

Sales topped $4.8 billion in worldwide sales from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, an increase of over 60% from last year.

Wall Street firm Truist Securities says Amazon is poised to capture 42 cents of every dollar spent during the holidays. Isn’t that the same as saying 42% of e-commerce dollars spent this holiday season will go to Amazon? Wow.

SOURCE:

The Bottom Line

The pandemic continues to accelerate the growth of e-commerce. While this has ...

A recent article in Entrepreneur by Scot Chrisman – 3 Psychological Biases That Affect Whether Someone Buys Your Product or Not – has some really important thoughts and insights for e-commerce merchants. This week, we’d like dive into each of these biases and discuss how you might change or modify your e-commerce experience in order to capitalize on them.

Let’s take a look and hopefully you can learn and gain from our suggestions:

1. Confirmation Bias

Chrisman defines confirmation bias in his article very clearly:

“Consumers love to feel right. They love to feel as though, they knew what was coming next. Like they’re ahead of the curve because they picked up on subtle clues. Confirmation bias is an important factor in crafting copy, content, and creative marketing strategies.”

Here are some methods for utilizing confirmation bias in your e-commerce experience design:

Pre-purchase thoughts: include ratings and reviews. If that’s not possible, include testimonials from a customer or two and highlight those testimonials as key content in your product description. If the product is not yours (you’re reselling it) include any information about positive news, pr, or awards that the product has won. You want to convince your customer that they are not only getting a good deal they can feel confident about but also how smart they are for choosing the best product. Confirmation bias can be utilized throughout the purchase product but keep it in mind as you craft not only your merchandising but your product detail and checkout experiences.

The following e-commerce features will also help to support confirmation bias and can be leveraged to help conversion rates:

Abandoned Cart Messaging

Abandoned browse messaging

Testimonials

Expert Reviews or Statements of support

Product description copy that can utilize truthful, honest superlatives

Use of Graphic-supporting content like award icons, badges etc

(Remember “as seen in TV?”)

2.Social Bias (The ‘Bandwagon’ Effect)

Chrisman describes the bandwagon effect this way:

“Since we all want to feel a part of the community, there are many things psychologically that we’ll do to test the waters and ensure we’re not going to do something against social norms. This is built into our psychological evolution in order to keep us safe, kind of like most of our psychological biases.”

Translating this to your e-commerce site may sound easy – appropriate and eye-catching integration with social channels, as well as the purchasing tools to support it – will help provide a sense of social bias in your purchasing experience. But it goes a step further than just promoting and selling your products on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

In a world so dominated by social media, where so many products are constantly visible to consumers, the real key to creating social bias is in ensuring prospective customers see your products being used by their peers or social groups that they identify with, in an apparently more ‘organic’ way. Some opportunities for ensuring this could be:

Create hashtag campaigns to ensure average customers are incentivised to promote your product (who know’s, maybe your brand will be ‘trending’ if you do it well)

Leverage the growing population of social influencers, this can cost more depending on the influencer (not every brand needs to hire a Kardashian and spend millions, there are many effective social influencer programs to tap into).

Build brand ambassador programs into your operating model

Often the key to creating a successful social media marketing program lies in creating a robust social media publishing calendar. The reality is that a one-off post from a high-cost social influencer will probably only be effective as part of a broader, long-term integrated social media marketing strategy.

Merchants should also consider content and merchandising adjustments that can help formulate social bias such as testimonials from VIPs or industry leader...

In our second episode, Frank and Graham consider whether it's best to start with a chosen platform selection and build your online storefront around it, or define your functional and operational requirements first.

There are a number of elements that factor into any platform selection process – even more when considering finding the right one for a B2B company. Let us give you an introduction into the way we think about this critical decision making at Accorin...

As part of our detailed project discovery work, we dissect these considerations in close collaboration with our clients. We talk to many prospective B2B merchant clients large and small...manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers alike and there is no such thing as a one-size-fits all solution when it comes to e-commerce implementations. Each B2B merchant’s needs are as varied as for B2C merchants...as are their budgets.

Over the years, because of this complexity, we have worked with Magento more than any other platform and years ago in the era of Magento 1, the approach was to use the core of the Magento 1 community edition version and then select from a number of extensions to add a more customized B2B functionality. Today with a number of different platforms offering B2B functionality “out-of-the-box”, the process can be more business/client centric. Our process invariably flows from our discovery process and the questions about the business that we get into as a part of that. To summarize (and simplify) this process and the rationale behind it and to help you understand which approach you might take we look at these key factors:

If the business is simple but needs basic, core B2B functionality

If the catalog and pricing structure is relatively straight forward but needs customer groups and price tiers

If the business structure and budget for IT is a better fit for SaaS

...then BigCommerce (a great SaaS solution) might be a good fit.

However:

If this business is complex

If there are multiple storefronts and/or global requirements

If your B2B buyer companies are complex and you need to provide multiple levels of controls over the organization’s purchasing

If you need a highly customized buying experience that may need to change over time

If you need customized features and a truly self-service experience tailored to your company customers

...then the chances are that Magento is going to be a better fit due to the rich foundational B2B features that come with it.

We have found in our 5+ years of mid-market and enterprise B2B e-commerce work that the B2B buying requirements can be incredibly diverse and that they can be different within the largest set of company customers that a B2B merchant has. While a SaaS platform like BigCommerce has some core B2B features, it is still a SaaS platform that has limitations on its customizability. This is fine for some B2B companies but not for others. Our Self-Service B2B e-commerce setup for Magento is flexible enough to be applied to a wide range of B2B businesses but works best with larger B2B businesses that have the infrastructure and business processes to support buyers with wide ranging needs.

For your reference, here are some summary feature lists for BigCommerce and Magento. We can help you find the best fit for your business from these platforms and we’d be happy to discuss them whether you decide to work with us or not:

“Out-of-the-Box” BigCommerce B2B Features

Price lists

Customer groups

Draft orders

Promotions

Restricted login

SSO & Login API

Functionality Supported by BigCommerce Partners:

Multiple price lists

User roles & permissions

ERP, OMS, CRM, & PIM integrations

Content management system \ Advanced search

Purchase orders

Quote management

Punchouts

“Out-of-the-Box” Magento 2 Commerce (not CE) B2B Features

Restricted Login

Company as Customer

Grouping N number of individual customers with a company

Roles and Permissions: controlling levels of purchasing authority

Purchase Order / Purchase Order Approvals (integrated with roles and permissions)

Price Lists

Price Tiers

Quotes and Quote Managemernt

Customer groups

Requisition Lists

Promotion...

In this episode, Frank Thompson interviews Accorin's VP, Service Delivery & Strategy, Graham Lubie to discuss the concept of "Self-Service B2B" e-Commerce, which we find makes for a more ideal e-commerce experience for our clients and their customers.

Shopify Recently released their Subscription App functionality to great excitement. As Shopify Certified Partners, we were able to get an early look at the Shopify Subscription functionality. Subscriptions are an important part of many of our customers’ e-commerce sites, so we are always interested in new platform capabilities. Historically we have implemented Subscription tools like Recharge, OrderGroove, Bold Apps, but have always felt that the integrations were cumbersome and that subscriptions needed to be integrated into the core platform. Well, now it is.

So, is this the demise of Recharge, OrderGroove, Bold Apps and other Subscription App providers? Probably not. Rather we expect them to evolve their offerings to take advantage of the new Shopify functionality. Here is why...

Shopify only launched a Framework for Subscriptions that can be used by 3rd party apps, NOT a complete subscription solution. The implication is that 3rd party apps need to be developed to manage many parts of the subscription lifecycle. These parts will likely be done by existing subscription app providers. Here is a summary table from Shopify of what is included in the Shopify Subscription App versus not included:

The Shopify launch does deliver two really, really important components; namely (1) a single checkout flow for one-time purchases and subscription purchases, and (2) management of subscription products inside Shopify.

Let’s dive into these changes:

1. Single Checkout Flow for One-Time Purchases and Subscription Purchases

Before the Shopify Subscription App, customers with a subscription product in their cart would checkout through a 3rd party checkout funnel. Some of the implication of this include:

Different branding for the two checkout funnels

Setup of payments, taxes and shipping for the two checkout funnels

Different analytics / metrics on the two checkout

Multiple payment and tax accounts for a merchant to reconcile

Customer order information in different systems

The need to maintain promotions in different systems

Shopify Reports would not have analytics details

Customer support admins cannot not place subscription orders for customers directly through Shopify

Going forward (once 3rd party subscription apps evolve to take advantage of the Shopify Subscription components), customers should have a single checkout funnel with one place to manage subscription-related customers and orders.

2. Management of Subscription Products Inside Shopify:

Merchants would not be able to manage subscriptions within Shopify. Rather products would be synched to a 3rd party subscription app and the merchant would have to make updates to the products in multiple places. Going forward (once subscription apps evolve to take advantage of the Shopify Subscription components), Merchants will be able to edit their products and enable / disable subscription options directly on the product pages.

The Bottom Line

So, will Recharge, OrderGroove, or Bold Apps be replaced by the Shopify Subscription solution? No, rather we anticipate that they will evolve and incorporate the Shopify functionality to provide a more streamlined user experience. If they don’t, other 3rd party apps will launch to meet their customer’s needs.

It remains to be seen how they integrate the functionality and the implications to their existing customers. Stay tuned for an update once more details are available.

For several years now we have been helping B2B merchants design, configure and deploy e-commerce websites using Magento 2. It’s obvious that the requirements of B2B merchants can be very different than those of B2C. B2B merchants typically need a lot more requirements in order to meet their customer’s unique needs. For example:

Price tiers

Company Catalogs

Customer groups

Customer Quotes

Purchasing on Credit

Company Specific Shipping Rules

Purchase order and purchase order approval processes

With the advent of Magento 2 commerce and cloud versions, B2B merchants now have a lot of functionality that can serve them and serve these requirements right out of the box. But setting up all of these features and making them work with all of the integrations that are typically required in a B2B set up can take a lot of time. It can also be frustrating to set it up differently for every business customer because they might have different requirements for their particular procurement process. At Accorin we’ve established a baseline B2B “self-service set up” for Magento 2 Commerce, combining out-of-the-box features and some of our own extensions.

Who Benefits from Self-Service B2B e-Commerce?

An example of a merchant that can most benefit from Self Service B2B is a retail supplier (wholesale) like an apparel company that sells to a chain of retail clothing stores. Within the chain there can be hundreds of stores and within each store there can be 2, 5, 10 or more purchasers, based on a hierarchy of responsibility. Here’s a fictional example of a simple B2B buying organization, a retailer with an HQ and 4 locations and multiple buying roles at each location.

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

What’s Included in Our B2B Self-Service Setup?

The self-service configuration has a number of out of the box features pre-configured, integrations pre-configured, and also some extensions that we’ve written that really help a b2b merchants provide a true self-service experience to its B2B customers and the users within those company customers. The Self-Service B2B setup has 5 key aspects:

1. Core B2B Features of Magento 2 Commerce

We start by leveraging what’s available to us out-of-the-box with M2 Commerce. We setup, configure and test with the required B2B integrations.

1. 1. Shared buyers on a single account

2. Request for quote

3. Company price lists

4. Make payment on credit / Credit limit checks (requires integration of course)

5. Pay for an order with multiple payment methods (Credit + CC)

6. Improved shipping management

2. Configuration of Company Customer Roles & Permissions

...and a cool integration of these permissions with our very own Company Address Book extension (see extension see #4).

When a B2B eCommerce merchant serves a company that has a lot of prospective buyers, things can get complex. The roles and permissions functionality within a business customer account allows a company customer to set up an actual purchasing hierarchy. This self-service makes your e-commerce store as easy to use as an internal purchasing system. Combined with subscription ordering and other automation it can really increase AOV for B2B company users.

3. Purchase Order Approvals

Purchase order approvals and their integration with Roles & Permission is a big part of release 2.4 and a big part of making Magento a truly “self-service” eCommerce tool for B2B buyers. Other Self service Goodies (Accorin b2b Extensions) including company requisition lists and previously purchased products increase the self-service benefits – the idea of company customers being able to truly self-service even the most complex purchasing – facilitated for buyers that have teams of people that also need access to purchasing from your merchant eCommerce store. As a part of Accorin’s Self Service setup of B2B Magento, we take a thorough look at your organizat...