General musings on relevant trends affecting today’s eCommerce platform providers:

• 1-click and the paradigm of the cart – Apple & Amazon have reprogramed our expectations of eCommerce. In the beginning the analog chosen was the shopping cart. This made particular sense for online retailers selling a diverse selection of goods. However, most eCommerce sites today focus on a particular product catalogue and the act of going through a shopping cart checkout experience simply diminishes conversion. For example, if I go to Burton to buy a snowboard, I’m not putting multiple boards in my cart. If I want to buy a digital camera from Cannon’s website, I’m likely only getting one. And even if I go to REI.com to pick up a replacement pair of sunglasses lost over the weekend, my goal is likely “in and out”. Now, this doesn’t mean that the “window shopper” doesn’t exist or that there aren’t many retailers looking to get you to add as many items to your “basket” as possible, but the act of shopping should support the “buy now” phenomenon popularized by Amazon’s 1-Click, Apple’s licensed use of it for iTunes and the Mac App Store, along with eBay’s “Buy it Now”. Many companies selling online are finding that their existing platform is “stuck” in the paradigm of the shopping cart and cannot even support simple concepts like a “single page checkout”. Note: This is the main reason why Adobe.com did not implement ATG.
• Mobile – Best Buy is struggling because it became the showcase for products to be purchased on Amazon later. Many savvy shoppers across all demographics are using their mobile phones to quickly price check items and do product research and lookup customer reviews. In these moments, some companies are supporting these requirements and others are losing the customer to a Google search that can often end with a 1-Click purchase of the same product in store bought from Amazon, which might even come with same day availability.
• Product management. / multi-channel – Customers expect that companies with both eCommerce and “brick and mortar” presences to sell the same products and have access to the same inventory. These systems grew up under different corporate owners and thus are different databases all together. Companies now aspire to have one master product catalogue that can have all information (PIM) managed centrally and enable pricing and inventory to be pushed out to physical stores, online site(s), and partner marketplaces (e.g., eBay, Amazon)
• Order management. / multi-channel – customers assume that if they buy online, they can return in the store. This requires centralized order management and visibility of all orders across the enterprise. Again, two systems today.
• Relevance & Retargeting – customers expect companies to know their shopping behavior and even their browsing behavior. Amazon has popularized “recommendations” and leads customers to expect more relevant, targeted content. This includes carrying this insight forward to marketing campaigns such as emails, SEM and display ads. Sites that tie these insights together best and incorporate them effectively in their marketing spend, convert higher and sell more online. Today, companies have to use a plethora of disparate solutions to build these campaigns and often miss the pattern that would “push the customer over the edge” to buy.
• Subscriptions – Beyond music, movies and games, more and more companies are finding ways to offer their products and services under a recurring order model. From shaving blades to organic produce, companies want to be able to bill for products and services on a recurring basis. This is not inherent in most eCommerce solutions and requires companies to support two billing solutions and two order management approaches.
• Flash Sales – Social, email campaigns, mobile SMS (text messages), native mobile apps, and the website(s) itself are all vehicles used to inspire quick conversion and/or ‘dump inventory’ that needs to be moved. Popularized by Woot & One Kings Lane, future platforms not only need to enable this by channel, but also enable “1-click purchase” and automate based on business rules (e.g., If product X expires on September 16th, 2012, and there is > than 20% of inventory within 30 days of expiration, deploy flash sale to “mobile app”, Facebook page and Amazon.)
• Social – While “social” receives tremendous amount of mindshare, company after company finds the results to be marginal at best. “It’s like trying to sell to someone talking to their friend at a bar”. While this may change over time, the key tenants above of enabling a product catalogue to be pushed out to different marketplaces and “flash sale sites”, is the same capability that can be leveraged by a Facebook page or whichever “social site” becomes the next standard (e.g., pinterest, Google +, yet to be invented).