Global Ecommerce Weekly News: 12th July 2022
Get up to date with this week's ecommerce headlines from around the globe.
Amazon News
Amazon under investigation by the CMA
Amazon is under investigation by the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority over claims it purposely gives customers a ‘worse deal’, with some of its practices violating competition laws. The company has been accused of distorting competition by putting third-party sellers on the UK marketplace at a disadvantage.
Amazon’s new robots may not be the solution to its high worker injury rates
Ecommerce giant, Amazon, has continued to introduce new robots while serious injury rates continue to increase in the company’s warehouses. Directors have claimed that the introduction of new robots are increasing efficiency while also collaborating with the warehouse workers to limit injury rates. Nonetheless, company records showed that between 2016 and 2019, serious injuries occurred more often in Amazon warehouses with robots than those without them.
Other Marketplace News
Royal Mail International services are now available on eBay
Ebay has partnered with Royal Mail to offer its ‘tracked & signed’, ‘signed’, and ‘standard’ services internationally. Sellers on the platform will now benefit from an easier and simpler process when exporting to Europe and other countries, opening up new markets and customers for eBay and its merchants.
Klarna unveils an $800m fundraising at a valuation of less than $6bn USD
Two years ago, Klarna was valued at $45.6bn, but is now seeing a fading valuation as economic circumstances pose challenges and investors turn away from tech companies. The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board is set to become a shareholder in the buy-now-pay-later firm, and the injection of this new capital is being undertaken at a pre-money valuation below $6bn.
Shopee opens 5 new distribution centres in Brazil
Singaporean shopping app, Shopee, has recently opened new distribution centres in Brazil in an effort to improve shipping processes and cut lead times. Since its launch in 2019, the app has made a name for itself and has taken a top spot in Brazil’s most downloaded ecommerce apps. The company has been over-achieving in terms of sales estimates and expanding into newer markets including Mexico and Spain.
Other Ecommerce News
TikTok abandons plans to expand its live commerce initiative in the EU & US
TikTok has struggled to gain traction on its ecommerce expansion in Europe and the United States. “TikTok Shop” launched in the UK last year, which was its first market outside Asia. It operates by influencers and brands using live broadcasting to sell products through a clickable icon on the screen. Despite livestream commerce being seen as the future of shopping, TikTok’s initiative failed to meet targets in the UK and other expansion plans into other EU countries fell through.
Read more on the Financial Times
India’s ecommerce market size set to reach $120bn by 2026
India has seen phenomenal growth in its ecommerce market, and has been predicted to grow from $38bn in 2021 to $120bn USD by 2026. The pandemic has accelerated the growth of the ecommerce market, and online shopping has significantly increased mainly due to the internet becoming more accessible and cheaper tariffs in the region.
More Resources
Germany Shopper Report 2022
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UAE Shopper Report 2022
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UK Shopper Report 2022
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Tmall Global Benchmarking Report 2022
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Aug 9, 2022
The Ecommerce Equation: 4 Levers CEOs Use to Drive Marketplace Revenue
Developing your ecommerce strategy for digital marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and Alibaba gets complicated fast—there’s a lot to think about, including marketplace SEO, product photography, advertising tactics, disjointed sellers, distribution logistics, managing ratings and reviews, and more. It can be overwhelming for brands, especially those with small teams, to know which behaviors to optimize for for the highest gains in profitability.
The good news? Revenue performance all comes down to data. Pattern was built on a data science approach to ecommerce success. We find the patterns that drive profitability, then apply them to boost our brand partners’ revenue on ecommerce channels.
And a key pattern we follow for all brands on digital marketplaces is the ecommerce equation: revenue = traffic x conversions x price x availability. As brands zero in on these four pieces of the equation, they can simplify and focus their efforts to reach truly profitable ecommerce growth.
1. Drive Traffic to Products
The first part of the equation is traffic—you need to get people to see your listings if you want to generate sales. There are two ways to drive traffic to your products: through organic search and paid search. Striking the right balance between both for your brands is crucial to driving enough of the right traffic to your products, ultimately increasing your ecommerce revenue.
Knowing this, Pattern provides the resources and technology needed to drive traffic to your product listings. Our brand management team, advertising specialists, and SEO technicians work in harmony to create a unified strategy to boost your brand’s organic profile and balance that with a paid advertising approach that works for your brand and listings.
Using this method, we took Feetures socks from ranking on longer-tail terms like “no show athletic socks black” to driving traffic on parent keywords like “no show socks.”
2. Create Content that Converts
Getting customers to your product listing is only half the battle. Once on your listing, you need customers to convert. Conversion is key to the ecommerce equation because it leads to real product purchases and revenue. Traffic without conversion leads to more time and ad spend without the ROI.
Optimizing your images, product description, bulleted details, customer reviews, and buy box performance is key to successful conversion. If you’re going to spend time and effort driving traffic, you should make sure customers can easily and clearly find what they’re looking for when they arrive at your listing.
While your imagery and descriptions are important, you also need to build customer trust to drive conversions. Studies show that your customer service efforts matter too—84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, making strong reviews an important factor of conversion on marketplaces.
The good news is as you provide a quality product and a great marketplace experience, you’ll build brand equity, increasing your customer loyalty. Then, as your reputation, reviews, and traffic grow positively, marketplace algorithms will recognize your popularity and improve your rank accordingly. Rank drives both traffic and conversions, helping you to optimize your performance further. As your brand equity grows, your conversions will continue to grow with it.
3. Control Your Price
While setting a strategic price is an important step in your ecommerce strategy, it takes more than that to truly control your price on marketplaces.
Without proper control and with wide distribution, your product could end up in the hands of disjointed sellers who lower your marketplace price to sell their inventory and make quick profits. With one seller lowering price online, other authorized sellers and retail partners are forced to lower their price to compete, creating price erosion and sending your brand down the profitability death spiral.
This Death Spiral damages brand equity, hurts conversions, and can lead to Buy Box Suppression on Amazon, hindering traffic as well. And as prices get lower and lower, your profit margin withers away, decreasing your overall revenue.
Using our data-driven insights and Pattern’s eControl partner Vorys, we help brands implement narrow distribution, identify and take-down unauthorized sellers, eliminate price erosion, and control their price online. Focusing on price control, Pattern helped LifeSeasons, a premium supplement company, take back 91% control of the Buy Box on Amazon.
Download the LifeSeasons 1-Page Case Study Here
4. Optimize Your Product Availability
The last piece of the ecommerce equation is availability. It makes sense to think of availability as a contributing factor in conversion, but we felt that it’s important enough to call out on its own—you can fully optimize your traffic, conversion, and price, but without availability, you can’t grow revenue for your brand.
A lack of availability leads to stock outs, losing conversions to competitors, losing possession of the buy box, poor customer reviews, a decrease in traffic…the list goes on. The best-performing brands on ecommerce digital marketplaces optimize their availability with high-end technology, optimize their cash on hand, and inventory time on hand to keep the ecommerce equation powered and optimized in their favor.
How Pattern Drives Revenue Using the Ecommerce Equation
Pattern is committed to solving the ecommerce equation. We partner with brands to provide the expertise, resources, and technology needed to drive traffic, create content that converts, protect price, maintain availability, and ultimately accelerate ecommerce revenue and profitable growth.
Interested in improving the results of your ecommerce equation? Schedule a call.
