Marketing Technology Playbook: E-Commerce

E-Commerce is much more than putting a nice user interface on a website and calling it e-commerce. E-commerce is a new way of doing business that crosses all company functions. Beginning with how you market your products and sites, to how you sell and collect cash, e-commerce touches every part of your business. To be successful it requires a holistic approach to ensure that you provide a winning customer experience.

Tactically, E-commerce also offers you new opportunities to market and merchandise your product in ways that will increase average order size and accelerate frequency of purchase. And it will reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction with self-service capabilities such as My Account or a Gift Registry, or Wish List.

Strategically, E-commerce can be used to open new channels, say a direct to consumer B2C channel or a B2B channel to retailers that could not be profitably serviced without e-commerce as the enabling technology.

The combination of new ways to market, new ways to shop and new technologies is what makes e-commerce rewarding, yet complex. So before committing people and money, it is critically important to understand your business objectives. Lack of a detailed vision will result in unnecessary spending, demoralized teams, missed launch dates and a host of other bad things.

This book was written to help you collaborate with your team to create a detailed e-commerce vision that can be communicated to development, marketing, warehouse and accounting teams. It covers the critical items you need to consider when making a platform selection such as “is it a B2B or B2C or omni-channel platform’? It covers key design considerations for the different pages within a site, highlighting was in needed on a Home Page or a Detail Product Page for example. It also highlights operations issues such as inventory availability, backordering, rejected credit card payment so that you can decide how you need to handle these functions in an accelerated e-commerce world.