Global Ecommerce Weekly News: 2nd August 2022
Get up to date with this week's ecommerce headlines from around the globe.
Amazon News
Amazon sees its share price rise 10% and beats revenue expectations
Amazon has exceeded revenue expectations, mainly due to its Amazon Web Services cloud business and its fast-growing advertising arm. Investors who have been concerned about the effects of sharp macroeconomic effects have been reassured as the ecommerce giant has overperformed and seen growth.
Read more on the Financial Times
Amazon set to launch localised versions of its Prime Video in Southeast Asia
Amazon is launching local versions of Prime Video across three countries in Southeast Asia, with new investments in local content. The service will launch in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, where users will be offered a 7 day free trial along with other discounted introductory offers. Prior to this launch, consumers in these countries had been able to shop cross-border on the platform but Prime Video has not been available until now.
Amazon closes down its cloud storage platform, Amazon Drive
By the end of 2023 Amazon Prime members will be losing a big feature, Amazon Drive, as the company turns its attention towards its Amazon Photos service. The tech giant wants to focus on photo and video storage features, allowing Prime members to safely back up, share and organise photos & videos with Amazon Photos, which is currently available on iOS, Android and desktop devices.
Other Marketplace News
Shopify lays of 10% of its workforce
Shopify has cut 10% of its workforce as it struggles with a slowdown in ecommerce growth. The company was relying on a permanent jump in online purchases in the retail space, and are now realising that incorrect assumptions were made, which now need adjustment accordingly.
Alibaba Group goes after primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
By the end of 2022, Alibaba will become dual-primary, listed on both the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and HKSE (Hong Kong Stock Exchange). Being listed in two major financial centres will allow the company to expand its openness and diversity, broaden its investor base, and will help to pave the way for its globalisation strategy.
Shopee and P&G launch virtual home shopping experience
As part of Procter & Gamble’s Regional Super Brand Day on Shopee, a new exclusive 360 degree virtual home shopping experience feature has been launched, with P&G brands of household essentials on offer, categorised according to rooms. Accessible through P&G’s official store on Shopee’s website and app, the feature includes multi-format touch points like videos, games, and localised content to make online home shopping convenient and engaging.
The Hut Group ends investment deal with Japan’s Softbank
UK ecommerce company, THG, has recently put an end to an investment agreement with Softbank due to “global macroeconomic conditions”. The deal was made to help fund the expansion of THG’s technology platform before going public in London. The company saw its share price fall after the announcement and its valuation remains well below its flotation price despite recent bidding wars.
Other Ecommerce News
Third-party online marketplaces sales to account for 59% of all global ecommerce by 2027
By 2027, third-party sales through marketplaces will be the largest and fastest-growing retail channel globally, accounting for two thirds of all online sales. Alibaba will continue to hold its place as the global leader in retail sales, growing total net GMV sales in 2027 to $1.5trn, and Amazon in second place with $1.2trn. The number of third-party marketplaces operating globally has increased by over 500% since 2007, and is expected to see further growth.
More Resources
Germany Shopper Report 2022
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UK Shopper Report 2022
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UAE 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.
