We love to keep tabs on the trends of online selling and sharing these insights with our merchants to help them drive new sales.  Occasionally, we'll highlight a particular report from an authoritative source in the industry such as industry pundits, cart providers or marketplaces.  

This "Research Roundup" shares some fun observations from Shopify's recently released report "Fashion and Apparel Industry Report"

A few key takeaways to consider:

What:  "...fashion and apparel [ecommerce sales] will increase at a compound annual rate of 10.6% from $408 billion in 2017 to more than $706 billion by 2022"
Why You Should Care: category and product agility (the ability to make moves quickly and easily to new products and categories) is the key for online retailers.  Whereas 10.6% annual growth is below the standard 15% you might expect, it's still a healthy, growing segment to consider
What Can You Do About It: start small: find a source who has data (so you can list well) and return policies (returns are 50% or more!) to support your market test.

 
What: brand loyalty and technology are no longer meaningful barriers to market entry 
Why You Should Care: the current industry players view this is a "threat" -- but as stated above, your agility is your advantage.
What Can You Do About It: see above -- test the market!

What: returns are as high as 50% 
Why You Should Care: enter this market with eyes wide open -- the returns rate is high because of how difficult it is to know the product will work for the individual using the product.  Until that problem is solved, expect your returns rates to be no different.
What Can You Do About It: establish a pricing model and operational procedures to support returns -- it will be your reality!

As reported in Tech Crunch, Instagram has continued experimenting on monetizing their users by embedding payments into posts.  

Unlike the current ecommerce program which sends user off Instagram to the merchant's site, the embedded payments means the user completes the transaction and stays on Instagram.   

While interesting, this is an early program so we'll monitor its effect on conversion and thus business case for merchants to adopt the offering.  For now we'd recommend merchants test the experience from a buyer perspective to get a gut feeling for applicability to their business.  

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet marketplace best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!

​We love to keep tabs on the trends of online selling and sharing these insights with our merchants to help them drive new sales.  Occasionally, we'll highlight a particular report from an authoritative source in the industry such as industry pundits, cart providers or marketplaces.  

This "Research Roundup" summarizes some of the key take-aways from Adobe's post-holiday report on ecommerce for the sites it monitors ("4,500 retail websites, 55 million SKUs, and more than one trillion visits").

While there are plenty of interesting statistics, a couple key takeaways stood out to us:

What:  When classifying merchants according to size, small merchants (those who, as classified by Adobe, do less than $10M online), have the highest mobile conversion rate.   That is, their buyers complete purchases on mobile devices more so than medium and large businesses!
Why You Should Care: small businesses lack the resources to out-market their larger brethren -- but they can still out maneuver them in terms of better buyer experiences to win the sale.  
What Can You Do About It: leverage our mobile best practices and be aggressive in terms of providing a mobile shopping and checkout experience.  

 
What: sales growth continues during holiday (no surprise!), fueled in part by more unit sales and cheaper products (especially in consumer electronics). 
Why You Should Care: holiday trends portend broader trends for the rest of the year, and it's never too early to start thinking about products for the next year, and adding cheaper yet higher-margin products to your inventory will ensure you well setup to take advantage of this trend now and in the future.
What Can You Do About It: work with your suppliers to identify new, cheaper products -- and start listing more products.

In a pre-Thanksgiving blog post, Google announced updates to their mobile shopping experience.  

Recognizing that mobile shopping habits continue to evolve, Google's changes to the buyer experience to help buyers "...browse, research, compare, and...[buy]."

Specific enhancements include:

• Easier access to key product information via a “Quick View” button which exposes a larger image, the product description, product reviews and seller ratings.
• A new label alerting the buyer if there’s a “newer model available” (in the case you are browsing last year’s product).
• Navigation that enables buyers to easily find similar or related products
• Merchandising so buyers can discover more products from the same brands or retailers

Underlying all of these changes is rich, merchant-provided data -- data that we can help find, organize, and enrich prior to feeding to Google.

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet Google Shopping best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!