Modern Commerce and the 8-Second Rule

This post is based on the webinar Experience-driven modern commerce powered by Adobe and Elastic Path.

You have eight seconds to grab your target’s attention, says a Microsoft study. People are shifting between four to five devices in a day and flipping through their feeds on the subway. There is no time. And, your customers don’t really care…yet.

The challenge is to make them care, or more accurately, make them feel that your brand cares about them. “Those eight seconds are your brand’s moment of truth,” says Ryan Green, Adobe’s Senior Manager for Commerce Strategy and Alliances. The time and money you invested in your product, website, and other channels won’t mean a thing to a customer who’s already left. “We need to listen, predict, assemble and deliver, all within milliseconds.”

How will brands meet this eight-second rule?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes

“Steve Jobs said it’s important to start with customer experience and move backward into technology,” says Green. It’s easy to get caught up in the technology and trends, and forget to ask what the customer really needs. Get into their experience. Put yourself in their shoes.”

Quantitative research isn’t enough. Talk to a real person. McKinsey recommends shop-alongs (where researchers watch customers in stores), co-developing promos and features with a focus group, and customer diaries that capture their reactions as they interact with your brand.

Knowing what customers need, feel and encounter — from huge challenges to everyday nuisances — can help you craft a very compelling customer experience.

Personalize and contextualize your messages

For retail companies in particular, personalization becomes imperative. Seventy-four percent of customers get irritated by websites that serve up content, offers or promotions that have nothing to do with their interests (Kissmetrics). You can’t be successful in e-commerce without personalization – nobody will sift through 500 products they don’t care about.

Monitor their shopping behaviors and preferences; segment offerings and retarget previous site searches and tell them when a product they’ve looked at goes on sale. Also look at context: your customer’s needs can change according to location and date. Is he traveling? Is his birthday coming up? “Having that contextual information is going to be important to you to deliver a great experience,” says Green.

Find the micro-moments and delight the customer

“It really goes end-to-end all the way from awareness, interest, consideration, conversation, loyalty and advocacy,” says Green. “Some of the great brands that I’ve seen lately have customer journey maps. They’re looking at these small, micro-moments and figuring out ways to delight the customer.”

He says that means commerce companies need to be consistent across every channel and every device, and the experience should feel easy and intuitive. Customers shouldn’t have to hunt for information or zoom several times to find a button then repeat that for the next page because the experience does not work on a new device.

Invest in speed and flexibility

Companies often run into several business challenges that limit their ability to deliver a good customer experience. Green says the most common issue is speed to market. “The big monolithic stacks are struggling. When you have thousands of lines of code, it’s very difficult and time-consuming to push an update.”

Another problem is the sheer tech complexity involved. Omnichannel is not a new concept, but the reality is that retailers are still wrestling with a complex ecosystem of specialized applications and services to support customer interactions. “Think of all the mechanisms and toolsets that will be touching a single asset such as a product photo,” says Greene.

Ideally, you have one marketing ‘Mission Control’ or centralized toolset, where you can build and manage omnichannel experiences without being dependent on IT. You can easily make changes on pages, tie it to the business process and commerce engine, add profiles. You have full control over creating the user experience.”

Headless content and commerce

The combination of Adobe Experience Cloud and Elastic Path Commerce provides that desired speed and flexibility. Adobe builds systems of engagement. You can push out changes to your website, mobile app, social wall, POS system – all at the same time. You can split customers into segments and personalize based on data. This is all headless content, managed from a centralized toolset.

Elastic Path Commerce is headless commerce. It takes care of pricing, catalogues, product search, promotions embedding rules from back-end systems and embedding transactional capabilities into all touchpoints.

With headless content and commerce, companies can monetize rich experiences with little reliance on IT and that means business agility. You can win that 8-second battle.

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Take 58 seconds to read how your business can make every moment shoppable with Adobe and Elastic Path.

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The 3 C’s of Commerce that Build Customer Delight and Loyalty

Commerce has evolved beyond the cart into an entire ecosystem. It’s not enough to have a beautiful website, a drop-down catalog, and bug-free checkout. All your competitors are doing exactly the same thing. The leading brands don’t sell a product, they sell an experience.

Experience-driven commerce is generated by engaging customers across different touchpoints in different ways and integrating your product into their daily routines. However, it’s not just about being ubiquitous, but being useful. You are there when they need you, you meet their needs in a personal and timely way, and they don’t even need to think when they click “Buy.”

The 3 C’s of commerce (and the technology and platforms that enable it) create that moment of delight. Anybody can sell a product, but only your brand can deliver it this way – and that is something people are willing to pay for.

Commerce in content

Traditionally, content was the “sales talk” that supported commerce. Digital catalogs and videos wooed and educated customers, then pushed customers to a link on a website. Apps provided an additional service or way to collect emails, and blogs gave SEO, and a reason to visit a site. However, brand communication and commerce were still parallel entities: aligned, but created in separate silos often leading to a fragmented customer experience.

Today, “Buy Now” buttons turn content into shoppable microchannels. Customers read it, like it, buy it – with no confusion and less time to change their mind. Since content can be tweaked to very specific markets and situations, the commerce-enabled messages should be useful and specific. Content no longer sounds like a “sales talk” but a helpful solution with built-in options to buy.

Commerce in context

At the time of brick-and-mortar stores, the so-called secret to success was “location, location, location.” In the age of ecommerce personalization, the secret also includes “timing, timing, timing.” The best brands anticipate what customers want and when they want it.

Commerce in context emphasizes curating choices for individuals using technology like machine learning, artificial intelligence, sensors, GPS, and analytics. These work together to learn customer preferences and predict customer intent. Ads and promos based on improved customer knowledge feel less like intrusions than they feel like a personal shopper.  They know what you are looking for, have scoped out the options and then tell you where to find gold: “We’ve found a new vacation for you and the family to visit the Caribbean. It offers sailing, snorkeling, and diving and you get a free car rental.”

Commerce in context doesn’t just narrow down choices; it liberates the busy, info-overloaded customer. “Smart websites” that “know” customer preferences and “smart devices” in the Internet of Things that can make automated purchases give them the one thing their money can’t buy: time.

Commerce in connection

Location, location, location is still at work. But it’s a bit different now.

The first websites took goods out of stores. Omnichannel experiences shatter the concept of “store” completely.  Brands can now connect with customers through in-store tablets, smart devices, social networks, chatbot, SMS, within a digital book or software – everything but the kitchen sink (unless it’s connected to the Internet of Things, in which case that can work as a platform too).  Today, physical stores are places where people can go to experiment with and try out products, or to interact with the brand in new ways. This allows stores to limit inventory, storing just enough for people to touch or try their products as they make their purchase decisions.

All these touchpoints help customers get products and services anytime and anywhere. They also provide opportunities for brands to find the ways that customers prefer to interact with them and to find new ways of delighting them at every turn. In a sense, companies now have to meet customers “where they are.”

Loyalty is built on consistent, positive experiences. When omnichannel is done well every interaction gives customers another reason to love your brand. Why would they buy anywhere else?

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The new rules of ecommerce are changing the way businesses communicate with customers and the kind of tools and commerce platforms they use to create that experience. Download the complimentary ebook The Future of Commerce to find out what industry innovators have achieved.

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Building a Digital Experience Platform for Modern Commerce: 5 Must-Have Pillars

The forces of modern commerce have changed all the rules. Lessons learned back in the days of single-screen ecommerce did not adequately prepare us for selling in the age of mobile, augmented reality, conversational commerce, or “thing” commerce. These channels are creating opportunities to monetize products and services along the path to becoming a modern commerce business.

Let’s look at this from the customer’s perspective.

A customer’s interaction with brands takes on many shapes. The brand should recognize the customer, their purchase history, and interests regardless of the channel. In experience-driven commerce, the conversation between a company and a customer is fluid, moving from one touchpoint to another seamlessly. This is what defines modern commerce: a consistent brand experience that recognizes and addresses individuals on a personal basis with 1:1 pricing, product, and promotions.

Here are the five must-have pillars a digital experience platform should include to make modern commerce possible.

1. Content management

Content management systems allow companies to manage content across touchpoints in a unified application. One system fuels customer experiences for web, mobile and tablet applications. The most modern content management systems can even fuel Internet of Things, marquis, and social media-based customer experiences.

When you shop online, you are likely receiving information from a content management system. It organizes and stores all the content that touchpoints “show” you. Because a single content management system fuels all the different media you use to interact with a company, your experience is consistent.

Without a content management system, each touchpoint requires its own system which interacts with legacy frontend and backend systems. Bringing a new digital touchpoint online is costly and takes a long time because the integrations required are complicated.

From a business perspective, without modern content management, speed to market with each new touchpoint and the ability to test new marketing strategies are severely limited.

2. Headless commerce

With the underlying content management system fuelling many different touchpoints, the question becomes: “How can a company build transactional capabilities into all these customer-facing experiences?”

That’s the role of the commerce system. Traditionally, commerce systems were tightly coupled to a particular experience. There was one system for mobile, another for web and yet another for in-store purchases. Today, “headless” commerce systems decouple commerce capabilities from the presentation layer.

Instead of creating a full stack system to sell products and services for the mobile experience, and another siloed system to sell via the website, a single headless commerce system can connect seamlessly to any content management system, custom frontend applications, and any other touchpoint or technology in the presentation layer. Separating the presentation layer from commerce logic gives marketers agility and freedom to create new transactional capabilities through any touchpoint. And customers are delighted with consistent and in-context experiences.

3. Analytics

To present prospects and customers with the right information at the right time (and price) along their buying journey, companies are mining their databases along with other sources.

Analyzing data presents a more accurate way to segment customers for targeted content including product and services recommendations, promotions and other marketing efforts.

For digital experience platforms, analytics solutions can look at aggregate purchase behavior to identify patterns and anomalies that marketing may want to exploit.

The analysis might, for example, determine that customers who purchased ski boots also purchased tennis rackets. Marketing can then create offers based on the segment “people who bought ski boots” instead of the less precise “people interested in sports gear.”

The bigger the data sets, the higher the probability that recommendations will be appreciated by a greater percentage of customers in that segment.

Another example of how a company might use data is to identify people who are sales “influencers.” By looking at sales transaction data, a company might find that a certain individual makes many purchases and that she belongs to many different segments. This buyer may have a significant influence on others. Then marketers can tailor campaigns to augment the natural influence that buyer has within her network of friends to encourage those to buy alongside her.

4. Personalization engine

Personalization engines use machine learning to go a step beyond segment-based recommendations offers and pricing. Personalization engines combine individual behavior with macro information to hone recommendations and offers at the individual level in real-time.

Behavior tracking across all customer touchpoints allows personalization engines to suggest products and services based on past and current customer interests. The personalization engine will combine known customer information with intent information based on analysis of current and past conversations and behavioral tracking— incorporating clicks, mouse movement, scrolling, inactivity and time spent per page to indicate preferences and interest levels.

The personalization engine employs a cascade of basic and more sophisticated algorithms to generate custom recommendations and configure a chain of “next best offers” to seal a sale. Each offer and each recommendation “learns” from the last. The more an individual “shops” with a brand, the better personalization becomes, creating a self-fulfilling circle of value for both the company and the customer.

5. Campaign management

To run campaigns that capture customers at the right moment in the right context, marketing needs a way to identify, create and present offers and campaigns to customers as close to a one to one basis as possible. The campaign manager maps customer journeys by segment—all the way to segments of one, if it can access the right data for personalization.

The campaign manager must also be capable of cross-channel delivery to enable conversational and contextual commerce. Campaign testing and measurement are fundamental and if combined with machine learning can be very powerful in creating personalized offers sent through a customer’s medium of choice.

The perfect foundation

When a brand builds a digital experience platform blending these technologies to create the perfect foundation, customers can’t resist. What these five pillars have in common is their contribution to business agility in a fast-moving digital world. They comprise a digital experience platform that supports modern commerce—personalizing price, product, and place in a way never possible before.

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Along the way to becoming a modern commerce business, there are many routes. Not all of them lead to success. If your company is looking to adapt to modern commerce, start by reading this eBook The Future of Commerce.

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How E-Commerce Can Become Carriers’ ‘Secret Weapon’ to Unified Customer Experiences

Today’s post originally ran on Wireless Week.

Against the technical backdrop of increasing expectations for always-on internet and mobile services, many carriers are struggling on the frontend with customer experience. All the interactions — in-store, chatbot, email, phone, text, website, app, messenger service, Facebook — must be unified and personalized. Nearly seven out of 10 carriers believe this will be the single most important factor in customer loyalty, according to the CMO Council and the Open Roads Community.

Fragmented Customer Experiences

Carriers have traditionally grown through acquisition, so they run on legacy systems focused on a particular set of products. They might have a system for a customer’s cell service account, another one for their internet account, and yet another for their TV service. These de-facto silos also mean there could be three “versions” of the same customer in three different systems.

It gets even more complicated when customer interaction systems are siloed by sales channel in addition to product line. Existing and potential customers might receive different offers for the same products across different channels. In-store customer service reps might not have access to all of the products a customer has with the company. Customers don’t understand why they receive two bills from the same company.

Customers get confused and frustrated from dealing with all these inconsistent experiences.

Systems Stifle Innovation and Agility

It is not just customers who get frustrated.

One of the largest cable and TV companies in Europe was centralizing IT operations in the European market to leverage quad-plays. Their multiple business support systems (BSS) and operation support systems (OSS) were in various states of upgrade and age. This presented a considerable challenge because a lot of the backend BSS systems were impossible to replace, but were never designed to provide a digital customer experience.

Many carriers find themselves in the same position.

The CMO Council Report found that just 9 percent of telco marketers felt their organizations were highly advanced and rapidly evolving to be more data-driven, customer-responsive and digitally adaptive. Another 47 percent admitted that while they were evolving, far more effort was required.

Only 4 percent indicated their organizations were delivering consistent customer experiences that were personalized and contextually relevant across all traditional and digital channels.

Telco marketers are severely hamstrung by backend and siloed systems.

It is technically very difficult to modify any portion, let alone tie them together to enable quad-play bundles. As a result, new campaigns might take months to get to customers. At the European cable and TV company, the typical time to market for a new campaign running across separate businesses and products within those businesses was three to six months. Not very agile.

Not only do legacy systems slow marketing down considerably, but they may also make it impossible to create new offers beyond those in the business support system (BSS). For example, how can marketing bundle a free Netflix account with a certain mobile data plan when the underlying business support system doesn’t even know the Netflix account exists?

How are Leading Carriers Closing the Gap?

Without a single view of the customer’s interactions with your organization, personalization is clunky at best, and impossible at worst. How do you get all those disparate systems to talk to each other without expensive, custom and increasingly risky integrations?

Leading carriers have found a way.

They close the gap between customer expectation and restrictive legacy system capabilities by incorporating what Gartner refers to as “API-based e-commerce software” which helps to facilitate consistent, personalized customer experiences across product lines and touchpoints.

Modern, API-based commerce technology “understands” the complex business rules in multiple BSS’s and injects transactional capabilities into all customer experiences. Carriers can now take advantage of legacy systems and power consistent pricing, product and promotional experiences across any touchpoint including in-store.

The Secret Weapon in Modern e-Commerce

One of the top three carriers in the United States knew customers were tired of complicated plans, data limits, global roaming fees and lockdown contracts. They introduced a single, unlimited plan for everyone. Their market share skyrocketed.

But even this company struggled to close the gap between customer expectations and their actual customer experience. They recognized that the different touchpoint experiences they had either acquired or built over the years focused on the wrong problem. They did not need a complete solution for each touchpoint; they needed a way to tie existing backend systems to any frontend.

They found the secret weapon: by taking advantage of API-based e-commerce technology, they were able to orchestrate the business logic housed in multiple legacy systems and apply that to any frontend device or experience.

The legacy systems still do their job.

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Are your legacy systems struggling to deliver the experiences your customers expect? Contact us to find out how our agile, API-first commerce platform can give you the ability to get ahead of customer demands, while continuing to take advantage of investments you’ve made in your legacy platforms. Learn about Elastic Path Commerce.

 

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Experience-Driven Commerce from Elastic Path and Adobe: making every moment shoppable

Today, at the NRF show in New York, Adobe announced a new set of services to enable experience-driven commerce. Elastic Path and Adobe, together, have been creating exciting new opportunities for retailers seeking to up their game.

Elastic Path has always been focused on experience-driven commerce. The products we engineer allow companies to embed commerce in any conceivable current or future customer experience. As far back as 2012, we pioneered an enterprise-grade commerce solution that integrates directly with Adobe. We focused on two critical capabilities for retailers: business agility and customer intimacy.

Business agility: pivot quickly to win the day

Being able to pivot rapidly in highly competitive markets like retail is crucial to survival. Imagine it is noon on the day you are launching a hot new product and your offer includes the new product plus an accessory. At 12:01 p.m. you notice a competitor is making the same offer. Would you be able to respond by 12:15 p.m.? And could you offer that response across all touchpoints—including in-store?

If it takes days to change systems to create a new offer or make a simple price change, a competitor with more agile systems will undoubtedly scoop your deal. Adobe’s content and marketing products integrated with Elastic Path Commerce provide retailers with a solution that can move quickly to respond to shifting market conditions and seize on opportunity.

Customer intimacy: draw customers closer no matter where they are

Experience-driven commerce is about customer experience, relationships and personalization. Retailers that benefit most from Elastic Path and Adobe are organizations looking to redefine customer engagement. They no longer view customer interactions as transactions.

They aren’t looking just for “add to cart” functionality, price lists, tax calculation, catalogues and payment processing. They are looking to improve the overall customer experience — adopting technologies like machine learning, augmented reality and the Internet of Things which will change the way people live, not just how they shop.

They are trying to conceive new ways of doing business that anticipate individual needs and remove bottlenecks to make their lives easier. They aspire to monetize customer experiences that move effortlessly across any number of different touchpoints to create value at the perfect time in that customer’s life.

Elastic Path allows retailers to create consistent experiences across any customer touchpoint. Experience designers only need to know how to work with Adobe and Elastic Path to build any experience and embed commerce. Any changes are automatically conveyed to all touchpoints. Any strategies like personalized offers and dynamic pricing are easily set in place.

Experience-driven commerce moves at the speed of shoppers through any touchpoint, blending digital with bricks and mortar commerce.

Avant garde retail: deluxe digital meets fabulous bricks and mortar

One Luxury Destination is a great example of experience-driven retail commerce leveraging Adobe and Elastic Path. To attract fashionistas from around the world to the famed Via Montenapoleone in Mila, top design houses including Giorgio Armani, Larusmiani, Prada and Gucci teamed up with luxury hotels to create a shopping experience that extends beyond the Via.

Prior to their trip, shoppers can tour Via Montenapoleone on OneLuxuryDestination.com. When they arrive at fashion central, they enjoy personal shoppers, private dressing rooms, and a 24-hour personalized online concierge to book tickets, restaurants and more.

Guests communicate with their personal shoppers and concierge, through the mobile app M Luxury and have the option to create exclusive, shopping events in the sumptuous VIP Lounge. On the Via, VIPs use M Luxury to access augmented in-store and outdoor experiences as they browse the district.

The app serves personalized content, offers and notifications of nearby events as shoppers explore the district and they can buy at any point during their stay—as well as long after their visit.

The combination of physical and digital elements establishes connections with customers before, during and after their visit, creating a personalized shopping experience that redefines the meaning of luxury.

Not all retail experiences will be as deluxe as One Luxury, but they can all benefit from the same strategies and underlying technologies. Experience-driven commerce begins with seamlessly integrated commerce and content tools. Elastic Path works with Adobe to help organizations engage with customers during any stage of their shopping journey – with no silos, no conflicts, and no limits.

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Become an experience-driven organization, pivot quickly and ensure every customer moment is shoppable. Learn about Elastic Path Commerce for Adobe.

Elastic Path will be at NRF and it would be great to meet with you. Want to connect in NYC? Contact us at info@elasticpath.com

 

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Commerce Trends for 2018: #1 Personalization in B2B

For a few years, personalization has been B2C commerce’s favorite catch phrase: know your customer, personalize the offers and prices, sell at the right time and keep communicating until you build a relationship and not just a sale.

But what about personalization for B2B (business to business) sales? In 2016 Gartner predicted that B2B companies that incorporate personalization into digital commerce will increase revenues by 15%. But do B2C techniques work for this audience?

Consumer marketing attempts to personalize for one person, and often uses emotions to connect and convince.

However, B2B marketing and sales often must address a board room of decision makers, any one of whom may block or veto a sale. Their approval is driven by logic and trust. That’s why it’s critical to provide the information businesses need from the get-go, anticipate their questions and initial reservations, and build trust—at the speed they choose, through their medium of choice.

B2B will look more like B2C

B2B has evolved way past just a simple order entry portal where customers already know what they want.

As early as 2015, Forrester saw manufacturers, distributers and wholesalers migrating their business to the web. In a sample survey of B2B buyers, they found that 74% of buyers research online and prefer to buy online through a “self-serve” website, rather than deal with a sales representative.1

In their 2016 Digital Commerce Hype Cycle, Gartner predicted that by 2018, companies that “consumerize” their B2B commerce will gain market share and see revenue increase up to 25%.

It’s critical for B2B companies to create immersive, contextual commerce experiences—as personal as a sales rep, but with much wider reach.

We predict the following three ways B2B companies will pursue personalization during 2018 and beyond.

1. Multi-touchpoint commerce

Customers expect to interact with B2B brands across many touchpoints including web, mobile, in-app, social, as well as in person. B2B marketers must be prepared to meet their customers via any touchpoint.

Even more than in B2C, B2B customer interactions must be choreographed under a single, strong, trustworthy brand experience.

Yet, according to Forrester, only 23% of B2B marketers feel they have customer-centric systems that allow multi-touchpoint commerce. Companies are still organized to prioritize one touchpoint (usually the website) or create channels for single product lines, rather than architecting systems for multi-touchpoint, conversational commerce.

B2B companies that adopt multi-channel commerce will benefit from being able to engage with customers from one touchpoint to another with more knowledge about what customers are looking for and how. This allows marketing to create targeted content that may help decision making. It can also allow marketing to cross-sell and upsell opportunities that generate higher average order values and more repeat purchases.

2. Power personalization with artificial intelligence

Following individuals across many touchpoints allows companies to improve their personalization efforts. While most of the focus has been on uses in B2C, B2B companies can use artificial intelligence to sift through customer data to create an “aggregate customer” from among individuals at the same company. They can then predict both individual and aggregate intent, as well as identify industry trends and target companies “ready” for purchase. This allows marketing to put together content targeted to individuals and special offers and bundles that make sense for the company as a whole.

Artificial intelligence will also power personalized pricing in B2B settings. According to Gartner, 40% of B2B digital commerce sites will use price optimization algorithms to create custom price lists for each customer. This goes a step beyond dynamic pricing where companies change prices based on supply and demand. Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and eBay automatically update prices several times a day based on margins, supply and demand, as well as conversion rates and customer history. B2B companies will adopt these same pricing methods over time.

3. Return to best-of-breed commerce solutions

Enterprise-class companies are no longer looking to add more servers to ensure they can sell many different products at varying prices to customers through any touchpoint. Scaling that way is extremely complex and expensive, often leading to failure. To build consistent customer experiences across multiple touchpoints, larger companies with high revenues and unique business models won’t be looking toward single-stack SaaS commerce platforms either.

They require enterprise-grade, best-of-breed commerce solutions that reflect their business model and can change rapidly in the face of competitive challenges.

A carefully thought out solution takes advantage of complementary technologies including customer experience, commerce, big data analytics, marketing campaign management, and personalization engines to name a few. The key is to ensure the parts can all easily work together with a single master commerce system to monetize customer experiences that go well beyond “add to cart” and discount coupons.

The $6.6 trillion prize

B2B will rely more heavily on multi-channel experiences, best-of-breed solutions and artificial intelligence to anticipate and serve business customers. Their investments in these technologies will pay off. Frost & Sullivan predicts B2B commerce sales will reach $6.6 trillion by 2020, overtaking the B2C commerce sales forecast of $3.2 trillion. The B2B market in the US alone is projected to hit $1.2 trillion in sales.

Personalization— and advanced commerce capabilities—will be critical for any company that wants a piece of that pie.

From everyone at Get Elastic, we wish you all a happy and prosperous new year.

1 pointB, Three Takeaways from the 2015 Internet Retailer Conference and Expo

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Checkout-less Shopping: Faster Payments, Smarter Customer Data

A bad checkout experience can lead to an abandoned cart and a tarnished brand image. Surveys show that 70% of customers get irritated by slow or chatty cashiers, and 49% hate seeing closed lines at peak hours. Keep them waiting for 2.5 minutes, and they get annoyed. Keep them waiting for 5 minutes, and half will just leave the store – and likely never return. (Retail Customer Experience).

Retail companies have tried to manage this pain point with barcodes, RFIDs, and self-checkout counters. But why not eliminate the checkout altogether? Here are some ways leading companies are using checkout-less shopping to create a frictionless shopping experience.

 

Grab it and go

“When checkout is working really well, it will feel like stealing,” says Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute. And no ecommerce technology comes closer does that better than checkout-less shopping.

Take Amazon Go’s “Just Walk Out” shopping experience.

You log into the app, enter a brick-and-mortar store, get what you want, and leave. What kind of sorcery is this? It’s the same artificial intelligence and machine vision found in self-driving cars. Sensor technology and video scans track your movement across the store. The data is synced with the handheld device, and when sensors (and face recognition) confirm you’ve left, the items are added up like in any other online shopping cart. You are charged based on your preset payment preference, whether that’s a credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay or bank account. This requires set-up on the part of customers, so they will likely only do that for stores they visit regularly.

Skip the supermarket lines

As early as 2013, Walmart’s wholesale division, Sam’s Club already had a “Scan and Go” app that let customers scan product barcodes and then pay at a special fast lane. With the 2016 update, people can pay straight from their phone. Within seconds, they receive an e-receipt to show to the “greeter” at the store in order to exit.

Sam’s Club still has traditional cashiers, but the app is useful for skipping lines especially during peak hours. Between shopping trips, the app also notifies customers about promos and sales related to their preferences and/or previous purchases. The traditional cashiers allow customers not yet enabled for a checkout-less experience to still spend at Sam’s. As they see the convenience of checkout-less shopping, they may convert over, and cashiers can help with that conversion.

Or not

There may be no way to completely eliminate lines because there will always be people who won’t have the right app. These people will still need POS systems, but not necessarily a human cashier. And the corner grocer (unless it’s a 7-11) won’t have the $ required to set up the technology necessary to facilitate checkout-less shopping so there will be lines there too.

Faster fast food payments

Pay for a meal without even opening your wallet. Apps from companies such as Chipotle, Taco Bell and Starbucks take your order and process the payment in cloud. Your food or drink is ready when you arrive at a dedicated pick up point, and the only thing you need to do is eat.

Google also launched its “Hands Free” payment in some restaurants in the California bay area. Customers can order, and just say “I’ll pay with Google.” Cashiers then verify your identity by asking for initials and viewing your picture. Some stores also have in-store cameras that snap a photo and verify your identity on the spot using facial recognition.

It’s not just a POS technology

Checkout-less shopping doesn’t just change the way people pay for their items. The technology changes the customer experience and opens new marketing opportunities.

“Our current dominant payment technologies have separation between the shopping experience and the payment experience,” says Tom Davis, president and COO of CSCU and Payments Review. “Since these newer forms of checkout-less shopping can happen within merchant controlled environments, in-store experiences can be blended with online and mobile experiences. This not only has advantages for loyalty, but can provide valuable data for several other purposes including target marketing and reducing shopping cart abandonment.”

Video analytics can now monitor what you buy, and what you return to the shelf or leave in your basket. Sensors can analyze movements across the store: where you go first, which aisles you spent the most time in, what you looked at and left (and may be interested in getting during the next sale). This is similar to the insights gleaned from clickstreams—and a powerful way for retailers to create personalized, data-driven shopping experiences.

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To find out more about cloud-based ecommerce technologies, visit elasticpath.com

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Is Your Commerce System Vulnerable to Meltdown on Black Friday Cyber Monday?

During Thanksgiving 2016, Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit record breaking ecommerce sales in the United States. Over 108 million shopped online. Total sales reached $9.36 billion, and mobile sales also broke the $3 billion mark. Online sales outpaced brick and mortar sales, as more people (notably the millennial demographic) chose to surf online for the best deals.1

Unfortunately, not all retailers were ready for the surge in traffic.

Macy’s, Old Navy, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Target and Newegg all experienced online technical issues. Websites lagged or crashed.2 Some customers couldn’t even log on. Others had a cart full of items that they couldn’t pay for, some even saw their items disappear and replaced by someone else’s selections. Many frustrated netizens took their complaints to social media, but for every person who bothered to tweet, dozens more simply took their money elsewhere.

Readying for the flurry

According to the Forrester 2017 Holiday Outlook Report, online retail sales will increase this year by 12% and companies have worked hard over the past year to optimize every part of the shopping journey to win, serve, and retain customers during this often make-or-break shopping season.

Raw computing power has become commoditized to the point where there is little benefit in owning and running infrastructure to handle super high traffic on just a few days of the year. For companies that experience highly variable computing loads, the cost of maintaining on-premise servers just to cover those high load days, is senseless. Retailers are preparing for Black Friday surges in ecommerce system traffic with demand based computing clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provide unlimited dynamic scaling. Computer capacity is adjusted according to demand, protecting both customer experience and costs since companies don’t pay for servers sitting idle in low season.

Companies using clouds like AWS to run their critical commerce infrastructure are also buying the expertise of the world’s top technology infrastructure platform experts. They’ll ensure new technology innovations are implemented as they arise.

The blurry season

Not only are total sales going to increase, but lines between physical and digital experiences continue to blur, putting more pressure on underlying commerce systems. Even brick-and-mortar shoppers use their mobile to check reviews or compare prices. Many retailers also use mobile presence technologies in-store. These customer tracking systems can provide contextual information to a commerce system that can then offer discounts via SMS or an app as people browse. Some stores have cut down lines by giving staff mobile point of sale devices.

All these technologies depend on reliable and scalable bandwidth in store as well as a commerce system that can handle digital and physical store purchase surges. With a unified transactional layer for online and in-store purchases, shoppers experience consistent products, pricing and promotions regardless of sales channel. Combine this with the power of AWS and the entire commerce infrastructure can easily scale as demand skyrockets. Checkout line clogging up? Add more mobile checkouts help line bust. Don’t have the right item in store? Let customers purchase anyway and ship it directly to their house. The flexibility that a unified commerce layer provides customers allows your company to solve the bottleneck problems that might sour their experience with your brand.

As commerce becomes more and more connected throughout the customer journey whether digital or physical, all transactions will go through a central system. Commerce systems running on a platform that offers guaranteed dynamic scalability will ultimately win out because they will be able to keep up with the unpredictable peaks of the holiday rush.

1 National Retail Federation, Retailers Made Black Friday Irresistible for Consumers with Great Deals, Online and In-Store

2 Forbes, How Retailers Botched Black Friday And Cyber Monday

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Your company’s commerce system doesn’t have to be vulnerable to a Black Friday, Cyber Monday meltdown or any peak shopping period. Learn more about Elastic Path Commerce for AWS.

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Top 3 Reasons Why 84% of Digital Transformation Projects Fail

According to Forbes, 7 out of 8 digital transformations fail. The problem is that companies aren’t actually transforming, instead they are only attempting to transform by wedging new mobile applications, engagement layers, or channels on old and brittle infrastructure. Frankly, this is not transformation, this is stagnation.

Here are some of the most common and expensive mistakes that send well-intentioned digital projects to their doom.

 

1 You’re not investing in experiences that customers really want

Successful projects aren’t built around shiny objects. They deliver true value to customers. Approach transformation from the customer’s point of view. What will truly fill a need, delight and support a customer along the buyer journey? Use both quantitative and qualitative methods to formulate and validate your hypothesis:

• Analytics
• Customer surveys
• Customer journeys
• Proof of concept before a larger rollout

2 You’re not planning for requirements

Failing to plan carries the opportunity cost of delayed or abandoned projects, which translates to lost customer sales while giving your competitors time to get ahead.

Define your project requirements, customer journeys and flows. Understand and anticipate necessary integrations. These details should be nailed down before you start to build to avoid mid-implementation changes and issues that can derail your effort.

3 You’re constricted with technology

Traditional, single-stack ecommerce solutions are coupled, meaning the front-end presentation layer and back-end infrastructure (the “stack”) are unified. This creates several technical issues and business limitations.

• High risk. With single-stack architecture, you can’t modify business logic without updating and redeploying the entire application. Over time, convoluted integrations and customizations make the whole application “brittle.” Even small coding errors can interrupt or bring down the system. Single-stack architectures amplify the problem due to the challenges in isolation testing.
• Difficult to scale. The pieces of a single-stack commerce engine share code, databases and memory. Separating out pieces that consume a lot of bandwidth or otherwise drag performance is a challenge. If traffic or consumption spikes, you must run more instances of your entire application, which can result in paying for additional licenses, hardware or hosting, or paying higher fees to your SaaS vendor. Some services and databases don’t scale at all, leading to suboptimal outcomes and failed projects.
• Stifles innovation. Hardwiring new touchpoints to a legacy system keeps you shackled to the version you’re using at the beginning of your project, and can prevent you from integrating newer, best-of-breed tech in the future.

That’s why top brands are abandoning siloed, single-stacks for more flexible headless commerce solutions.

With headless commerce the business layer and the presentation layer are decoupled from each other.

• Flexibility. Headless commerce allows you to deliver customer experiences the way you want, without requiring back-end development.
• Stability. Development teams can work independently, without affecting other teams’ code or release schedules. They can focus on key areas like system security, availability, and auditability. Leaving the underlying code untouched ensures a stable platform that can be easily upgraded in the future.
• Agility. Front-end teams are able to adapt and make changes rapidly and fluidly. When a new front-end technology arrives, the impact of experimenting on it has minimal effect on the entire system. Agility is no longer a “nice-to-have” but now is very much a “must-have” for businesses to survive and flourish.

There comes a point when you need to stop adding to legacy or homegrown systems – it becomes too restrictive, arduous and expensive – and for most organizations, that time is now.

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Learn about digital transformation from customer experience leaders. Download Elastic Path’s free ebook to find out more about the future of ecommerce.

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