Whilst preparing for a recent presentation I was giving, I found myself questioning whether innovation in ecommerce had ground to a halt. Now I’m not talking about innovations in technology here, there’s a lot of that going on. I’m talking about retailers embracing these innovations and applying them to commercial ecommerce websites.
I look back at 2007 and think about all the exciting things we were seeing/doing for clients. From the initial appearance of the single page checkout; to ‘shop the catwalk’ pages; look books; video product detail pages, etc. 2008 was all about optimisation and best practise; squeezing every last drop out of a site visitor. All good stuff of course, although it still amazes me to think how some retailers are still not doing these basics right.
But what has 2009 brought us? Outfit builders? Well, yes, but that’s not really caught on yet. Social Commerce? Blogs are great at engaging and drive traffic, but that’s certainly not new to the web (just to some fashion etailers). Luxury brands selling direct? Painfully slow. Twitter Commerce? hmmm.
So you see where I’m coming from. Not quite the heady days of two years ago that’s for sure.
Why has this happened? It’s certainly not because creative agencies have run out of ideas that’s for sure. (I can only speak from our perspective as an independent ecommerce agency trying to earn a buck of course). And there are all sorts of great new opportunities out there on new and exciting platforms like Magento Commerce. What we've found is that firstly, retailers have been extra cautious this year and are opting for the ‘safe’ option. Budgets are going to systems that do the basics really well, but aren’t going to set the world on fire with new functionality that customers are demanding. There’s also a shortage of brands actually looking to change platforms right now. We saw a massive increase in ecommerce platform deployment in 2007 and 2008, but this year it seems to about getting those systems to pay back on the initial investment. No new systems mean little progress in innovation. I’m pretty sure this will be the same story for the rest of the year as Christmas is around the corner and no retailer will dare do anything to their very stable (and very vanilla) ecommerce website.
Fair enough you might say, but at what expense? Well the reality is, to stay competitive in the ecommerce space, you need to stay ahead of what every one else is doing. There are more and more websites out there that are selling the same thing. Why would a customer prefer one over the other?
So there you have it. Four more months of struggling to get out of bed and living in hope of that brave client that wants to take the next step in ecommerce. One that understands the endless possibilities that something like open source can bring. One that allows it’s agency to really pull out the stops, using budget to do something creative, exciting and innovative in our wonderful world of ecommerce.
Revolution Magazine
