With summer approaching, our team here at Accorin is feeling the heat! There are no summertime doldrums in the world of e-commerce; in fact things are heating up. With Prime Day buzz and Accorin’s e-commerce customers planning for Q4 sales programs, summer is actually a really busy time for us.
To keep you updated on the latest trends and happenings in the e-commerce space, we’ve curated some informative articles for you on e-commerce trends, marketing approaches and how e-commerce companies approach customer support and services. We hope these articles add value to your e-commerce business!
TRENDS
As more e-commerce companies are selling larger products online, the delivery process for such products has become more complex. Times have changed; previously, deliveries for large items would typically be done from a central regional/local warehouse with last-mile delivery done by a fleet of company-owned trucks. These days, that approach is no longer possible as distribution centers have become more spread out and merchants are selling to customers outside their region.
In addition, customers’ expectations have also risen. When customers purchase furniture online, they expect a streamlined delivery process, regardless of where the order is being fulfilled from.
In response to this need, Schneider National acquired two trucking companies to improve the delivery of furniture and other large products to corporate customers and retailers as well as individual retail customers.
This merger is a great opportunity for e-commerce providers to standardize on LTL (Less than Truck Load) deliveries. This type of national last-mile service allows e-commerce companies to provide standardized online shipping tools for large products and better serve their customers.
Read more about the Schneider National merger
MARKETING
Our team believes that your service is your marketing. The more satisfied customers you have, the more they mention you positively on social media, the more customers you get. It’s a loop that reinforces itself!
The challenge of using high customer satisfaction as a cornerstone of your marketing strategy is that the customer’s actual experience has to be authentic and match the hype. Or else it just falls flat.
We think JetBlue is a great example of how this strategy can work well. Their marketing hinges on their service, and it is backed up by their staff, their boarding approach, their in-air offerings and the customer experience of their brand online.
Like JetBlue, John Deere is focusing on customer satisfaction as a way to reinforce their brand. One way they are doing that is using the digital space to augment their physical product offerings. They have introduced enhanced online services to support their customers with information, and to help increase satisfaction by using information to “efficiently increase uptime and performanceâ€. This also has the added benefit of adding value to supply chain efficiency as it provides early supply signals to their dealers to have the right spare parts on hand.
Read more about what John Deere is doing here and here.
INSPIRATION
The e-commerce inspiration for June is Worth New York, a fashion brand that started out with stylist trunk shows, and now includes a rich online presence.
Homepage
The elegant design of the homepage is a wonderful representation of the company’s style. We like the focus on the brand story that draws visitors to further dive into the site and explore more content.
Lookbook and Product Detail Pages
We are particularly impressed by the way they use curated look books to highlight seasonal styles and drive visitors to multiple groupings of clothes. The different pages all have nice, clean visuals with enough content to keep visitors interested and to drive them to browse the product offerings. We love the minimalist look of their Product Detail Page and how it also ties in to the company’s core sales channel, stylists.
The lookbook leads to the “look”….
Which leads to the Product Detail Page.
Become a Stylist
An interesting element of their website is the ‘Become a Stylist Page’. While it’s not part of the normal e-commerce purchasing flow, the page is an important part of Worth New York’s ‘stylist’-based business model. Naturally, as a high-fashion site, the photography and models are beautiful. It’s a perfect example of omnichannel e-commerce where the website supports the company’s other channels as well.
TECHNOLOGY
Continuing the focus on personal style and stylist supported e-commerce, our team took a look at Trunk Club and how they integrated chat into e-commerce for enhanced customer support.
How can you improve customer support in an impactful way? What Trunk Club found was that it took an average of 2 weeks to connect with a customer over the phone and what’s more, 80% of customers did not want a call! So to meet customers’ preferences and improve their connection rate, they introduced online chat. It turned out to be a great, asynchronous way of providing good support, and increased their conversion rate by 54%!
Read more here
THE BOTTOM LINE
That’s all for our June edition!  As always, we will be keeping our ear to the ground for what’s new in the world of e-commerce and digital marketing.  Check back for more insights next month.
