E-Commerce Now: A Wide World Of Channel Possibilities

By Wilfried Beeck

The global e-commerce market has been going gangbusters for a number of years now, with key drivers of merchant success including mobile, omnichannel and marketplaces. In 2016, global online retail sales will hit $1.6 trillion, rising to $3.5 trillion in 2019.

The interaction between online and offline sales has never been so important to consumers, and potentially fruitful for technology providers and their partners.

When we discuss big retail numbers, we most commonly think about online giants such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart. However, the remarkable course of e-commerce has been an SMB phenomenon — in fact, if we look at Amazon, some 45 percent of all goods are sold on the Amazon Marketplace by SMB retailers. On eBay, SMB merchants have accounted for a 20 percent annual growth rate over the past five years.

As a result, the market for retail technology is surging. Recently, we have seen Salesforce acquiring Demandware for $2.8 billion in pursuit of a slice of the e-commerce market. According to Forrester, spend on e-commerce technology globally stands at $2.6 billion today and will double by the end of the decade.

At a time when the demand for cloud business applications is rising by 20 percent a year, it seems remarkable that many resellers still do not offer e-commerce systems and consulting services.

Advancements in e-commerce platforms mean that it is now possible for any service provider to offer a powerful, yet easy-to-use e-commerce solution. For example, we are seeing more hosting providers, of all shapes and sizes, seeking to adopt or update e-commerce offerings.

For the reseller, addressing the e-commerce customer has some excellent benefits. The e-commerce user offers a high level of ARPU and customer lifetime. And, resellers have much potential to tack on value-added services. In fact, the market for associated design, implementation and support services comprises an additional $6 billion today, rising to $10 billion by the end of 2019.

Of course, this opportunity has not gone unnoticed. E-commerce pure players, such as Shopify, have seen remarkable growth. The valuation of these providers serves to underline the high value of e-commerce customers. For example, Shopify achieves a market value of $3.6 billion from a relatively modest installed base of 300,000 SMB merchants worldwide as opposed to a market value of only $5.1 billion for GoDaddy with its more than 14 million hosting clients.

Get In the Game

So how does a reseller explore e-commerce for the first time, and what should they look for in a platform partner?

It is true that e-commerce means rapidly evolving technology. The strongest platforms today will fully enable cloud agility and fulfill the widest set of merchant needs possible.

While there are options across both open-source and software-as-a-service solutions, the right choice will depend on a reseller’s skillsets and the customer’s design, maintenance and security needs.

There are now very effective plug-ins for site builders and CMS platforms like WordPress, as well as feature-rich standalone shop packages. A fully managed white-label SaaS platform can deliver a high-quality, robust, all-inclusive service while freeing the reseller to focus on sales.

The best platforms make powerful e-commerce solutions plug and play. It is essential that your e-commerce partner works hard to evolve in line with all the best and fully localized integrations, payment and shipping methods and apps that shoppers demand.

Philbert Shih of Structure Research, a leading analyst to the cloud industries, stresses features and functionality related to payment and shipping features. Consumers are demanding, and they won’t tolerate a slow or insecure site.

Of course, successful merchants mean successful partners. Look for:

We’re gearing up for the holiday season. With so much potential to share in the retail success of your customers, now is the time to scope out your options.

Wilfried Beeck is CEO of ePages GmbH. He studied Mathematics and Computer Sciences in Kiel before founding the company in 1983. Together with Stephan Schambach and Karsten Schneider, he also founded Intershop Communications GmbH in 1992 and managed its IPO in 1998. In 2002, Beeck left the board at Intershop AG to concentrate on the development of e-commerce solutions for the SME market with ePages. He is also an investor and board member in a number of high-tech companies.