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Weekly Recap of eCommerce News - W22

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Ana-Maria

The internet is a great, yet overwhelming source of information. Every week, we read the articles published on eCommerce blogs, journals, and websites. We then curate and sum up what's hot and what’s not in eCommerce, and link to the information that matters to you. 

Here’s the lowdown on some of the hot topics in the industry last week:

  • Advertising & Marketing Trends: content marketing ideas for the summer
  • Plugins & Products: WooCommerce Product Slider Plugin; June product release overview
  • Payments: Payment processing in real-time; dunning
  • Headless Commerce: headless commerce’s expected emergence; problems headless can solve
  • Customer Service: creative ways to thank customers
  • Things to listen to: BOOM’s Take on Facebook Ads; scaling ethical fashion brands; 

Marketing and Advertising

As long as content is king, you have to keep exploring how to use it to keep audiences and customers engaged, especially through the sweltering summer months when everyone tends to take more time off their screens. Armando Roggio has summed up a few ideas for the summer, in general, and the month of July, in particular. From teaching new skills and live streaming to special occasions that make for great opportunities to get users to generate content, you can find several inspiring ideas in his article published last week. Spoiler alert: On the 23rd of July we celebrate Gorgeous Grandma Day, a day dedicated to nans around the world which means it’s also a day to come up with original content.  


Plugins & Products

Images, but most importantly, lots of images are essential if any home or landing page is to hook your website’s visitors. WooCommerce knows it and they have developed a few plugins that allow you to show your products in all their glory, or show more than one product on the same page. Saud Razzak reviewed the product slider plugin in this article, comparing the free and paid versions and taking you through the setup process step by step.


Practical eCommerce’s June product release overview is here and it’s a hefty one. This can only mean one thing, lots of exciting things are happening and lots of new opportunities for eCommerce businesses are coming up, from Instagram’s product drop section, Google’s integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, GoDaddy and Square, Facebook’s Live Shopping Fridays, Pay with Flexa making cryptocurrencies payments a thing of the present and many more. Take a long lunch break and read through the complete list here

Payments

Real-time payment is here to make life easier for eCommerce merchants. Payment is one of the key aspects of a seamless customer experience. The process going on in the background might be complex, but it has to appear easy at the customers’ end. As most customers shop online these days, payment processing has had to reinvent itself and take leaps it had not taken in the last 40 years. Things are now quickly changing with Real-Time Payments - a new technology developed by The Clearing House. Real-Time Payments does exactly what its name says by facilitating the cooperation between companies and banks, allowing for payment automation, and ultimately, increasing the speed of payments. Read about how Real-Time Payments is slowly taking over the world and some of its advantages in this article. If you like the sound of better data and insights, payment failure mitigation, and continuous availability, then you will love this technology. 


For subscription-based businesses whose biggest problem is ‘churn‘, dunning is the solution. Let me explain the concept before you head out to Mark Thompson’s new article on dunning management to learn what to do about the lost revenue from failed transactions. Dunning is essentially the process of transforming the frustrating experience of a failed payment into a pleasant one. There are ways to prevent failed transactions with a well-thought pre-dunning process in place, as well as ways to handle them elegantly when they do occur. We all know payments are a sensitive issue and no one likes the process of paying for services made more difficult. This is why dunning management is key to avoid losing revenue over technicalities. 

Headless Commerce

This isn’t the first time you’ve heard us mention headless commerce and it’s unlikely it’ll be the last. If you’ve ignored it thus far, it’s about time you looked into the concept and tried to grasp it. There are numerous reasons why this is not just a trend but, some argue, it has been coming for a while as a natural development in eCommerce and is evolving at a much quicker speed than traditional platforms. For those still looking, this article gives several reasons why headless commerce is here to stay and why businesses should go headless sooner rather than later.

Understanding ow to make the most of headless commerce is no easy feat. You need to understand what your needs are and have a vision of how your business will scale up to know where the flexibility and agility of a headless architecture can come in handy. With headless, you can get the latest technologies and trends and combine them in a backend that offers a top-notch customer experience. This article explains in more detail how to pin down potential problems a headless architecture can solve. 

For an overview of how content management systems have evolved, the road from decoupled to headless CMS, and the benefits of these developments read this article. While it might get technical going into the details of the back and front-end development, it’s really helpful to understand how eCommerce can offer amazing customer experiences and what might be next in line. 

Customer Service

How do you show your gratitude and appreciation towards customers? Scrambling for ways to say thank you that are more ingenious than an email that will most likely be ignored? There are a few ways to stand out and this article has collected several creative ideas that will make your customers rave about their experience all over the internet. 

Things to do and listen to

This week Smart Marketer comes back with another podcast on ad spend. This time, Molly Pittman talks to BOOM CMO about one of their worst Facebook ad performances since 2019. We all know we can learn more from mistakes than successes, so head over here to listen to their “failure” story, learn about the experiments they conducted to improve their ad-spend-revenue ratio, and how that has given them a new perspective on data. 

Scaling an ethical fashion brand comes with its own, very specific set of challenges. In this podcast, Shopify founder Felix Thea talks to Candice Munro, founder of Buttercream Clothing about how she turned a side gig launched during her maternal leave as an additional source of income into a successful brand and how she quickly grew a slow fashion eCommerce store.  

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This article was brought to you by Ana-Maria

Ana-Maria is a content creator, copywriter and brand storyteller with extensive experience in eCommerce and the creative industries.

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