4 Trends That Dominated E-Commerce in 2013

1. Scalable logistics and fulfillment.

Explosive growth was the holy grail of retail sales. But on the back-end of the operation, many e-commerce providers found that fulfillment and logistics couldn't keep pace with customer demand, especially when it came to quick and instant. To more accurately calibrate fulfillment capabilities with sales benchmarks, online retailers insisted that third-party logistics (3PL) providers demonstrate their ability to quickly scale for higher order volumes with no degredation in quality or speed.

2. Real-time personalization.

Personalization has become a marketplace essential. Consumers want the ability to tailor product details to their personal preferences in real time. As a result, online sellers were counting on 3PL providers or in-house teams to add personalized features (e.g., monogramming, personalized messaging and custom packaging) to orders without interrupting fulfillment and shipping schedules.

3. Cross-channel experiences. 

Seamless, cross-channel shopping experiences were a must for retailers that wanted to connect with multichannel consumers. With more and more consumers performing shopping activities through a variety of channels (often simultaneously), retailers needed to provide consistent experiences across a diverse range of touchpoints. This meant logistic providers needed to help retailers ensure an accurate view of real-time inventory, regardless of whether that inventory resides in a store or a warehouse responsible for e-commerce fulfillment. This would enable consumers to shop where and when they wish to shop, resulting in more consistent brand experiences throughout the buying cycle.

4. Branded delivery.

The brand shopping experience didn't end until the package arrived at the customer's doorstep. To maintain consistency from online browsing to delivery, retailers moved away from the standard brown box and using branded delivery packaging that featured various shapes, colors and sizes. For multichannel brands, this allowed for an experience that's similar to an in-store experience. For near-luxury brands, it can be the differentiator that sets them apart from the competition. Online retailers are also investing more in back-end warehouse options to improve shipping speed and convenience.

The best retail brands recognize that constant evolution is a requirement for successful e-commerce. Although the idea of once-and-for-all e-commerce infrastructure is a pipe dream, the incorporation of key trends and developments in e-commerce strategies can go a long way toward helping your brand stay ahead of the marketplace.

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The Future of E-Commerce - e.g. Web 3.0

The internet continues to evolve and, as such, new retail business strategies are constantly being developed that take advantage of internet technology. In the first two evolutionary phases of the internet, for the most part retail strategies chased technology. However, as the internet has firmly established itself as an integral part of retail business marketing and sales success, a much more proactive approach is being taken by e-commerce business strategists and developers who are now creating internet technologies instead of waiting for them.

The enormous customer base created by social media has been realized and now the next evolutionary phase of the internet, Web 3.0, is just on the horizon and is already creating exciting new internet retail strategies and technologies that will push e-commerce to great new levels.

Since its arrival, retail business has been seeking out every opportunity to capitalize on the power and potential of the internet. In its earliest form, the internet was no more than a means to bring static photo and pages of readable text to those who surfed the web. While this was little more than an online catalog per se, it was the first step in reaching out to a curious new audience of web browsers with a hit or miss chance of capturing a new customer along the way. E-commerce was born in what was later labeled Web 1.0, or the "readable" web.

The internet was quick to evolve and it wasn't long before the technology to interact via World Wide Web arrived. Social networking was born, which completely rewrote the book on how people looked at and used the internet. No longer just a large library of static informational pages of text and photos, the internet was now dynamic and quickly became a part of people's everyday lives.

Web 2.0 was the "writable" internet. With more and more people climbing on board the social media train, marketing technology took advantage of this great opportunity by creating targeted advertising technologies that monitored the web search requests of those browsing the internet and bringing them relevant and even localized product advertisements. E-commerce was truly on its way now, but still had not really come into its own. From a marketing perspective, it was still chasing technology, but that's all soon to change.

Today, internet marketers are no longer waiting to adapt to the next great breakthrough the internet offers them. Instead, they're taking a proactive approach in creating the next internet evolution, Web 3.0, the transcendent web. Social, content, SEO - are all on the minds of digital marketers, consumers, retailers, etc.

From an e-commerce perspective, the aim of Web 3.0 is to capitalize on the expansive social web network. Through new and enhanced methods to interpret internet users’ habits, it becomes possible to learn more of the specific interests of the shopper that can bring very targeted advertising to each individual, thus creating a much more personalized online shopping experience. This is in contrast to today's targeted advertising which may, for example, detect that a user performed an internet search for wedding dresses, which in turn results in advertisement after advertisement of nonspecific wedding dresses.

In a Web 3.0 scenario, targeted advertisements may result in nontraditional wedding dresses for plus-size, middle-aged women, better fitting the profile of an individual and making these advertisements far more useful and likely for a sales conversion. Another example might be searching for a movie to watch. Where the last generation of movie advertisements might bring listings of local cinemas, a Web 3.0 era search might result in horror movies only playing after 10 p.m. at two specific cinemas, all based on historical information that's been captured and analyzed through the collection of social networking and internet browsing data and even sentence structure and behavioral data patterns of the individual that can be compared to others.

The semantic web is also a key building block to Web 3.0 as the standardization of web data helps to further enhance the ability to connect web data and other web-connected machines that communicate with one another, resulting in a more refined internet search.

Through the integration of social profiles, the semantic web, the technology that will allow the storage of vast amounts of data, and the use of artificial intelligence to interpret and filter data, Web 3.0 will be the next great revelation to e-commerce. Web 3.0 is still very much in its infancy stage, but it's coming so get prepared! Get ready for the ride of a lifetime!

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