The 2018 BigCommerce Partner Summit wrapped up today in Austin, TX, and I was especially glad to be a part of the festivities. While this is primarily an event to update service partners on the roadmap ahead for the popular commerce platform, there were also some highlights on what’s ahead for online and mobile commerce heading into the holiday season.
If you’re not using BigCommerce for your ecommerce platform, don’t bolt just yet. This post is primarily going to recap trends and priorities that independent retailers like yourself should be keeping in the back of your minds.
Trends and what’s ahead for eCommerce
- Amazon owns commodity market, DNVBs (Digitally-Native Vertical Brands) are disrupting the private label online market. In the middle are traditional retailers who struggle with tech debt and to keep pace
- Personalization is a major way to differentiate – custom product bundles, BYO designs, recommendation engines
- Community building and offline experiences will create stronger brand buy-in – events, pop up shops, user generated content and contests
- Limited edition products – unique variations of your products that create urgency and repeat purchases from existing customers
- Personal customer service – DNVB brands are very large (50M – 150M per year, hundreds of employees) but they prioritize the soft skills needed to make their customer service feel like a one-on-one interaction, whether during the buying or post-purchase process. This is key for traditional/independent retailers as well.
Top priorities for BigCommerce to better serve merchants
- Headless commerce – BigCommerce open API to make sure merchants have limitless options to how they build their integrated solution (full autonomy, complete customization)
- They are continuing to invest in being the best mid market platform 1M-100M – improving infrastructure, record uptime and an open API.
- Recently launched a WordPress integration which will give more merchants using the world’s most popular CMS access to their eCommerce platform
- Dedicated to expand their integrations with other solutions that retailers are dependent on, like Point of Sale. One of the reasons we like BigCommerce, works very well with POS like Springboard and ShopKeep. Their open API makes them a top solution for POS that are using API integrations.
- Multi-inventory control for brick and mortar retailers is a big priority this year
- Moving toward being a cross channel platform – selling on multiple channels (Amazon, Facebook, eBay) and managing those channels all through a single platform
Have any thoughts about where eCommerce is headed?
Submit your question or thoughts here and we’ll comment back as soon as we can!
