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eCommerce Trends: What Retailers Can Expect This Holiday Season

CenturyLink

Our rapid pace of digital innovation has thrown some new wrinkles (and opportunities) into retailers’ plans and the upcoming holiday season is a prime example. For consumers, it’s not just about fighting crowds anymore. Cyber Monday is still growing in scope. This shift in consumers’ ever growing acceptance of the benefits of online shopping puts even greater stress on retailers and their eCommerce strategies. The holiday season is a great time to take a look at what eCommerce innovations top retailers have been focusing on all year.

In the thick of the Holiday season last year, USA Today reported that Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of 2014 by far. It was also about 12 percent larger than Cyber Monday in 2013 which was larger than 2012 which was larger than 2011.

That trend alone comes with essential infrastructure enhancements to support the increased traffic and tools needed to provide the desired customer experience.  Retailers should be prepared to support more transactions than previous years.

The USA Today story also stated that foot traffic in stores on 2014’s Black Friday weekend was lower than expected even as online shopping soared the following Monday. So, the trend is not only that Cyber Monday is getting bigger, but it’s getting bigger faster with each passing year. It is likely that its growth will accelerate as more shoppers demand a seamless experience across channels – a cohesive omnichannel experience – in-store, online, mobile, and apps.

The 2015 Holiday season is likely to see retailers integrate eCommerce strategies in new ways and gain new insights they can take into 2016. Here are three key trends we’re seeing among many of our eCommerce customers.

Trend #1: Big Data Analytics Improve Online Shopping Experience

Strategic goals of many retailers involve improving customer experience and increasing orders or revenue per customer. By effectively managing and utilizing your data and leveraging insights from big data analytics, some organizations will have a big leg-up on their competition. An increasing number of retailers are utilizing customer and industry data to perform predictive analytics to better serve customers and deliver the experience the omnichannel shopper desires. For instance, multiple customer touchpoints (in store and online) can power recommendation engines to provide customers options that might be useful for them and, at the same time, make the retailer’s site and sales process stickier and increase total revenue per customer.

Analytics like this can personalize the omnichannel experience in new ways. Shopping and buying can happen online in different sessions and can produce data to delight the individual customer. Some retailers are planning on capturing a greater share of the holiday shopping wallet by pushing real-time coupons to mobile phones once shoppers are on your site or in your store. Personalized experiences will create happy holidays for shoppers and retailers alike and analytics are a primary tool for this personalized experience.

Trend #2: Infrastructure Planning and Managed Hosting Don’t Happen Once a Year

The holiday shopping season tests assumptions about infrastructure. If your website crashes or a purchase times out, your entire business is impacted as that shopper goes somewhere else.

eCommerce encompasses many aspects including web hosting, payment processing, authentication, supply chain, distribution, as well as shopping carts and other classic eCommerce tools. We’ll see if these applications are ready to withstand record demand! This is where organizations are focusing on adding  more resources, more compute, more network, more storage etc. Where are those applications located? Are they on-premises or are they housed and managed by an MSP that ensures uptime SLAs? Are organizations realizing the ROI and capex savings of leveraging the pay-as-you-use dynamic scaling capabilities of some MSPs?

In an unpredictable environment, we are seeing a turn toward elastic infrastructure, designed to expand and contract dynamically. Using a hybrid IT architecture allows you to add solution components such as processing for key applications or network circuits to expand as necessary within the required hosted environment – shared hosting, cloud, dedicated and/or colo.. And after the holiday season when traffic is more consistent, organizations can ramp down infrastructure services to save cost.

Trend #3: Security Isn’t Just a Holiday Season Requirement

Security concerns aren’t limited to the holiday season. However, a security breach would create an eCommerce nightmare during the holiday season. Security has become an arms race. Even large enterprises can be stretched way too thinly to protect against all possible attacks. It can also be expensive to build your own security staff and capability. That’s why many organizations are leveraging sharing security responsibilities with an MSP with adequate expertise and experience. Many are finding that technologies such as DDOS mitigation, firewalls and enhanced cyber-security services are best managed and monitored by experts 24x7, with service-level agreements for reassurance.

The race to Cyber Monday is really the culmination of everything you’ve learned about your business over the last year. The trick is that you can’t just do a linear extrapolation. Digital commerce is accelerating each season and that sets the tone for the coming year. To say it differently, in eCommerce the holiday season does not occur at the end of the year. It is the start of the next wave of infrastructure and technology planning for the year ahead.