Acceptance of Ecommerce as the norm

Quotes

• “DynamicWeb offers a cloud-based digital experience platform. We enable customers to deliver better digital customer experiences and to scale e-commerce success through our content management, digital marketing, e-commerce and product information management solutions. We are globally situated and we have over 4,000 great customers, 300 international partners and we have fun with 200 colleagues.” - Eric Jan“I fully agree there is so much possibility these days, thanks to technology and it’s becoming easier and easier to really connect everything but sometimes the biggest question is, should you connect everything? The shift to e-commerce that has really started many years ago already.” - Eric Jan “Self-service continues to grow in B2B. We also know that going through sales reps for B2B e-commerce is slowly declining and is now around 40%. The current climate is also really majorly shifting everything towards e-commerce of course and I think we are seeing an epic shift in e-commerce that basically puts a decade of change.” - Eric Jan“When I think about e-commerce I often reflect back to my time at eBay. It’s been 10 or 15 years and it was my last traditional e-commerce role and the marketplace was dramatically different. eBay was considered the leader of e-commerce while I was there, Amazon started being more competitive and eventually took over but it was really challenging to manage your own e-commerce store.” - Ben  “The only people that were selling their own e-commerce products were the large enterprise customers like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Home Depot and today there’s tools like Shopify, there’s all sorts of hosted e-commerce solutions that mean you can be in the marketplace or you can have your own end destination.” - Eric Jan“There are indeed solutions like Shopify out there and getting an e-commerce store started takes probably half an hour and a credit card. It has become easy to of course scale it up if you are mid-sized or even enterprise business; it's a different story.” - Eric Jan“Going via marketplaces, you are already talking different languages. Not every solution easily connects to these marketplaces. Quite often, you also need a product information management solution with middleware connectors or directly connected to marketplaces like Amazon but of course Amazon is one of the behemoths out there, but there are tons of other marketplaces in the world and ability to connect to all those is not an easy thing to manage.” - Eric Jan“In product information perspective, you always want to be ensured that you have accurate and enriched product data available and you can pass that on to your own e-commerce store, you can pass that on to the marketplace. Rich product data enables you to give better product experience, product experience can fuel better customer experience and from there on you should see some positive result bottomline.” - Eric Jan“The difference of course is do you go via marketplaces that have the community or do you build your own e-commerce environment and it doesn’t have to be an and/or by the way.” - Eric Jan“I think of it as a very verticalized experience. If you are a standard e-commerce product, a physical good, or CPG product, people are likely looking in the marketplace. 60% of all e-commerce starts on Amazon so you probably want to have a presence there but if you are something like an impulse buy like a lot of fashion brands, it makes a lot of sense for you to market on Instagram and Facebook and then you need your own store.” - Eric Jan “Certainly since the whole current outbreak, we’ve seen that social commerce has really taken a flight as well. But again, that can go quite nicely integrated or via middleware to hook up to your own environments.” - Eric Jan“What we’re seeing and this is quite high-level, if you’re talking B2C and you start with Amazon, yeah 60% to 80% of stores start there in certain parts of the world. But believe it or not, in the Netherlands, Amazon only joined this year. So not all countries are that far developed in terms of Amazon.” - Eric Jan“Certainly when you’re looking at certain brands, smaller shops, fashion shops and all that they have taken a massive flight to social because with the technology these days, it’s not hard to get off the ground.” - Eric Jan“It’s interesting when you think about a marketing channel dictating what your platform looks like. Because I am selling printed t-shirts and people are buying those $25 items as an impulse buy, I need to market them to Instagram. That’s the quickest path to conversion as opposed to building brand recognition.” - Ben “There’s a flip side of the coin where we are going through drastic change in user behavior related to the outbreak of the coronavirus and offline businesses are either being shattered or their experiences have changed to things like curbside pick-up.” - Ben “E-commerce will not always make the difference for companies to exist after or not. I know that’s a bit of a strong thing to say but there are so many smaller businesses hurting right now. The ability to really have something turnkey go live is what really makes a difference in their continued existence or not.” - Eric Jan“At the same time, some of the mid-size and bigger companies that are now also joining this digital transformation shift are actually encountering that they are in a much better position digital than they’ve been before. They are able to go either direct-to-consumer, they have a better control of how a product is experienced, and as a brand they have better opportunity to be found in search engines.” - Eric Jan