Global Ecommerce Weekly News: 14th June 2022
Get up to date with this week's ecommerce headlines from around the globe.
Amazon News
Prime suing Amazon after it ends its free Whole Foods delivery perk
Until now, Amazon Prime customers have been able to get free 2 hour delivery on Whole Foods products and orders of $35 and above. Prime users are suing Amazon for ‘depriving members of the benefit of their bargain’, saying the company should have reduced the cost of the Prime membership accordingly.
Amazon offering to share marketplace data with sellers
In 2020, the EU Commission charged Amazon with using its size, power and data to gain an advantage over competitive merchants selling on its platform. In an attempt to avoid a fine and persuade EU antitrust regulators to close investigations, Amazon has offered to share marketplace data with sellers and boost visibility of rival products on its platform.
Amazon ramps up social media influencing campaign
Amazon is flying influencers to high-end resorts to push social media presence. Influencers are given the opportunity to earn some money by promoting the company’s products on their own social media accounts. The online influencer marketing industry has grown from $1.7 in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to see further increases this year.
Other Marketplace News
Walmart could be considering to launch in the UK
Online retailer, Walmart, may be thinking about bringing its platform to the UK, which the marketplace itself is denying. Allegedly, the company is asking UK sellers to sign up to Walmart Marketplace, which could prove to be the competitive rival to current dominating ecommerce retailer, Amazon.
Shopify shareholders vote in favour of protecting CEO
Shopify’s CEO, Tobias Lutke, has been granted a 40% voting stake, or a special ”founder share”. The company recently went through its slowest quarterly revenue growth since going public in 2015. Investors have said they have faith in Lutke to take the company further amid industry challenges.
Shopify launches ‘Audiences’ to help sellers combat Apple’s privacy changes
Shopify is expanding into the advertising market in order to combat Apple's privacy changes. The new policies have made it harder for merchants to target and measure digital advertising. ‘Audiences’ was created in response to Apple's privacy changes, making it easier for Shopify sellers to find customers on Facebook and Instagram.
More Resources
Germany Shopper Report 2022
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UK Shopper Report 2022
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Tmall Global Benchmarking Report 2022
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UAE Shopper 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.
