Weekly Recap of eCommerce News - W26

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 August 2021, Video Marketing Platforms
• Plugins & Products: Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, eCommerce Product Releases
• Headless Commerce: Headless Unpacked, Headless Commerce and A/B Testing
• Conversion Optimization: Building an Enterprise Data Strategy, Google’s GA4
• Things to read or listen to: The Future of Chat Marketing, Summer reading List 
• The eCommerce week in numbers: Lindex’s Livestream Shopping, Nike’s Q4 Online Sales Report

Marketing and Advertising

Content marketers are creative people that can make just about any topic worthy of being shared. But sometimes a little inspiration can’t hurt. Armando Roggio put together a list of topics you can create content around in August to fill up those social media calendars and keep followers engaged. He backs up his choices with facts and figures to help you pick the content that best suits your audiences and goals.

Video marketing is versatile and companies need platforms that allow them to create videos for all purposes, whether it’s marketing campaigns, sales pitches, or customer service knowledge base articles. This piece introduces 8 of the best video hosting platforms out there for those looking for an alternative to YouTube. 

Plugins & Products

Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s online store product director, called it the “biggest and boldest upgrade we have ever shipped to the online store”. Store Online 2.0 includes a rebuilt of three main areas: themes and the online editor, store content and developer tools. In the same announcement, Lee also gave customers a sneak preview of the upcoming CMS. If you’re a Shopify user that’s eager to know what these changes mean to you, head over to this article for an in-depth analysis of their impact on businesses. 

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Shopify is not the only player in the eCommerce world that has brought new things to the table last month. In this piece, Sig Ueland reviews the products launched in the last month from Facebook’s expansion of Shops and their Buletin Newsletter app to Litmus’s Integrated Insights Report, Loadchief and Velo Payments partnership for last-mile deliveries, Bambuser’s Shopify app for live video shopping and many more. 

Headless Commerce

Headless is still the talk of the town. On a recent episode of the Retail is your Business podcast, hosts Marc Raco, CEO and Co-founder of MediaMouth Network, and Rebecca Fitts, Director of Real Estate at Leap, spoke to Bold Commerce CEO and Co-Founder, Yvan Boisjoli about - what else? - headless commerce. They also covered the importance of an elevated checkout experience and the future of digital experiences. The key takeaways are summed up in this article, in case you missed our previous recommended readings on headless commerce. 

Headless commerce, A/B testing, and subscription models. What do these things have to do with one another? An API, also known as a headless approach is great for A/B testing because it allows you to create unique checkout experiences from scratch and then test them to optimize conversion rates. Letting the data derived from A/B testing dictate the next move will ensure that businesses not only optimize their conversion rate but also retain customers, especially important in subscription models. This article explains how headless enables companies to test more, gather more data, and ultimately, retain their customers. 

Conversion Optimization

Data is the backbone of eCommerce. Yet, many find it intimidating and for very good reasons. Gathering data is one thing, finding out what to do with it is a whole different ball game. Martina Bretous spoke to  Zosia Kossowski, the group product manager for the business intelligence team at HubSpot about the 5 steps needed to build an enterprise data strategy. Learn how to outline your data architecture, how to define the relationship between BI and your teams, why it’s essential to assign ownership and establish data governance, and what to take away from regular reassessments. Head over to the Hubspot blog for detailed descriptions of all the steps.

Probably the number one provider of analytics, Google has launched GA4, a new analytics tool that promises to tackle the challenges that come “with major shifts in consumer behavior and privacy-driven changes to longtime industry standards”. Here you can find an overview of the problems the GA4 promises to solve, its added features as well as the reasons why you should jump on this bandwagon. 

Things to read and listen to

Molly Pittman & ManyChat CEO, Mike Yan discussed the future of chat marketing. ManyChat launching its beta integrations with Instagram and WhatsApp is a clear sign that social media platforms are looking towards adding chat marketing to their portfolio. Learn all about what’s next from their talk. 

What else are the summer holidays for is not to catch up on your reading? Molly Pittmann and John Grimshaw put together a list of readings to keep you busy this summer. This list promises to have something for everyone, from marketing to the intersection of life and business. 

The eCommerce week in numbers

High-fashion apparel brand Lindex staged and live-streamed a beach fashion show in May 2021. The result was a staggering 55% add-to-cart rate, meaning more than one in two viewers added something to their cart during the live stream. Until 2020, the brand’s online sales had stayed in the single digits. The pandemic pushed the retailer to experiment with new ways to engage with customers online. Live streams became a  regular event for the company that now streams at least one show a month. Retail research firm, Coresight estimates U.S. online live streaming sales at $6 billion in 2020 and predicts the number will almost double in 2021 and reach $25 billion by 2023. Read all about this success story in this article. 

Nike just ended the fiscal fourth quarter of this year with a boom. Their online sales went up 50% from the previous quarter, and 37% over the entire fiscal year. Online sales now account for 21% of the company’s total revenue. Nike CEO, John Donahoe says there is “a fundamental shift in consumer behavior towards digital”. Moreover, there also seems to be a shift towards mobile, with 40% of its direct-to-consumer digital business in Q4 coming from its two eCommerce mobile apps, the Nike and SNKRS app. This piece sums up Nike’s learnings as well as some of their most recent challenges.