Site Performance | Digital Commerce 360

2023 Top 1000 Report

Matt Love — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:00:39 +0000

Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 Report is the ultimate guide for retailers, investors and technology providers of ALL sizes to drive growth online.

Packed with over 200 charts, benchmarking data and growth analyses, this report covers every inch of the pre- and post-pandemic ecommerce landscape and answers the most-asked questions across the industry, like:

The Top 1000 added $75 billion in incremental revenue in 2022. What are the implications for retailers?
How has ecommerce penetration changed coming out of the pandemic?
What are the 5 key predictions for online retail moving forward?
How has inflation affected conversion rates and AOVs?
BOPIS v curbside pickup: which is the winner?
Are mobile apps the key to higher sales?
Why is growth slowing for digitally native brands?
Is Buy Now, Pay Later worth the risk?

With over 20 years of experience under our belt, only Digital Commerce 360 can deliver the high-quality intelligence and exclusive insights included in this report.

Find out why the Top 1000 – our flagship product and all-time bestselling report – continues to be the most trusted source of ecommerce research by businesses around the world.

View the table of contents for full details on what’s included in the report.

Published June 2023

WHAT’S INCLUDED

Rankings, Benchmarks and Category Data

In addition to a full ranking of the Top 1000 online retailers by 2022 web sales, this report includes:

Category data snapshots on the 14 key merchant categories of the Top 1000
Fastest-growing retailers by merchant type/merchandise category
Benchmark data, including conversion rates, AOVs, shipping, omnichannel, mobile, payments, web features and many more

Here’s a sample of the Jewelry category data:

Executive Overview & Growth Analysis

Read through our major findings on how the three-year pandemic period has affected the Top 1000. Topics include:

10 key insights from the Top 1000
Bankruptcies, acquisitions and funding
Inflation and supply chain worries
5 predictions for online retail
How retailers are adapting to shoppers’ changing needs

200+ Data-Packed Charts

Visualize the power of the Top 1000 and trends in North American ecommerce in over 200 charts and graphs, covering topics like:

Amazon vs. Top 1000 pandemic-era growth
Top 10 payment methods offered by the Top 1000 in 2022
Acquisitions involving Top 1000 retailers since 2022
Top 1000 retailers that offer free shipping options

Here’s a sample from the report:

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT

Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 Report is the most thorough analysis of U.S. ecommerce available anywhere on the market.

This report is a must-have resource for retailers, investors and service providers looking to grow a robust online business and succeed in today’s transforming retail world.

OTHER CONTENT YOU MAY LIKE

Top 1000 Database

North America’s leading 1,000 online retailers, ranked by annual web sales

Top 500 Database

North America’s leading 500 online retailers, ranked by annual web sales

Next 1000 Database

North America’s online retailers ranked 1,001-2,000 by annual web sales

U.S. Ecommerce Market Report

Analysis of the U.S. online retail data and performance over the past year

The post 2023 Top 1000 Report appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.

Online flower retailer records highest-ever revenue day

Abbas Haleem — Mon, 22 May 2023 19:16:56 +0000

More people have reason to send a gift on Mother’s Day than on Valentine’s Day, said Katie Hudson, content director at online flower retailer UrbanStems.

And whereas UrbanStems typically sells five times more than a usual week in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, it sells 10 times more than a usual week leading up to Mother’s Day, she said. Moreover, conversion for UrbanStems Mother’s Day sales increased nearly 50% compared with the retailer’s average conversion, she said, without revealing specific figures.

The UrbanStems homepage, captured Friday, May 12, shows a Mother’s Day promotion of up to 30% off for double bouquets.

UrbanStems Mother’s Day sales

The retailer had its best revenue day ever on May 11, the Thursday leading up to Mother’s Day, Hudson said, without revealing a dollar amount. That coincided with its highest site traffic on the same day. Hudson said the retailer has yet to determine if this was its best Mother’s Day period to date, “but most likely. We are still figuring this out due to refunds and redeliveries.”

UrbanStems site traffic in the week leading up to Mother’s Day increased more than 400% compared with non-holiday weeks. Its average order value also increased more than $10 during the sales period.

“Typically we’ll see a spike,” Hudson said. At least for Mother’s Day, people are more likely to do gift sets, which are more expensive with us, or to do add-ons.”

That led Hudson and her team to do A/B tests to determine whether offering add-ons at checkout boosted AOV. She said the retailer did not see a difference in having add-ons appear during checkout, so going into Mother’s Day, it removed the add-on upsell opportunity to improve site speed.

“What we found was that when the add-ons were being shown in checkout, it would cause the site to load a little slower because it was having to call to see what add-ons were in inventory,” Hudson said. “So we removed that, and even then, some people were choosing add-ons before they got to checkout.”

A/B testing

The overall boost in site traffic made Hudson realize she could squeeze in some last-minute testing to optimize landing pages.

“So many people were coming to the site that we could get a result we knew we were 100% confident in — in half the time we normally would,” Hudson said.

On May 11, just three days before Mother’s Day, UrbanStems tested versions of its landing pages from social media with and without customer reviews. But when the retailer removed reviews, it saw conversions decrease 25%, Hudson said.

From there, Hudson said, UrbanStems better understood how much its customers care about reviews.

“They want to see how the actual product arrives,” she said.

Optimizing social media and digital marketing with APIs

UrbanStems also runs design feature experiments using web design vendor Zmags’ Fastr Frontend interface, which connects to the platform via an application programming interface (API).

About 10% of sales during the period came from Zmags custom pages for podcasters and influencers UrbanStems worked with. Those pages averaged an 8% conversion rate, Hudson said.

Hudson said UrbanStems also tested its paid landing page made using Zmags against the Mother’s Day product landing page, which runs on the retailer’s Shopify-powered ecommerce site.

“With that, we saw a 200% lift in conversion when we drove people to the Zmags experience versus just our normal PLP when they’re coming through paid social. We’re constantly testing,” Hudson said. “The conversion rate numbers that week of Mother’s Day in general were insane and not the norm, but we were able to keep testing and getting it better and better.”

The UrbanStems Mother’s Day product landing page on May 12 shows how soon shoppers can receive bouquets.

The UrbanStems Mother’s Day product landing page on May 12 shows discounts, overnight shipping options and an out-of-stock bouquet.

Countdown timers

UrbanStems also used Zmags to include countdown timers across its site, including on product landing pages, even before Mother’s Day. The retailer worked with Zmags to automate the timers to count down to 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in cities where it offers same-day delivery, then automatically update each day to count down again. UrbanStems offers same-day delivery in Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles.

Hudson said UrbanStems had never used the countdown timer on its homepage before Mother’s Day, so it ran an A/B test in which 25% of the site traffic had a timer on the page.

“We just wanted to make sure because our homepage was already converting so well,” Hudson said. “We didn’t want to mess with it too much.”

It increased conversion 2%, which Hudson said “wasn’t huge, but it was enough to say it was a clear winner.” Then, the timer went to 100% of UrbanStems’ audience.

UrbanStems also uses Zmags for its landing pages for site visitors coming from social media platforms. Some of those pages touted 11% conversion rates the week of Mother’s Day. Hudson said even though that’s when purchase intent is highest among UrbanStems shoppers, she and her team had not seen an 11% conversion rate for such a page.

Post-Mother’s Day

Hudson said UrbanStems did not run any paid social ads the week after Mother’s Day. Instead, the retailer is using the post-holiday time to reflect on what it has learned.

“We need to have customer reviews,” Hudson said.

Furthermore, UrbanStems must develop a landing page that prioritizes customer reviews higher on the page.

“Taking some of the testing we did and iterating on it after Mother’s Day is going to be really important,” Hudson said.

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Ecommerce accessibility lawsuits reached a new high in 2022. Here’s why retailers should worry.

Mary Meisenzahl — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:33:16 +0000

Ecommerce retailers remain vulnerable to lawsuits targeting accessibility requirements, according to new data from UsableNet, a digital accessibility research company. Unclear legal requirements also leave users with disabilities to fend for themselves, as the law is primarily enforced through lawsuits.

Legal requirements vary

The lawsuits UsableNet tracked involve the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Different courts adopted various interpretations of the law, but the general consensus under the ADA and many state and local laws is that ecommerce websites must be accessible to users with disabilities, Tim Springer, CEO of digital accessibility solutions company Level Access, said in an interview.

Blind customers who use screen readers to access the web bring the majority of these lawsuits, UsableNet says, but they also include people with auditory disabilities who file lawsuits over videos that lack captions.

Lawsuits are up, but things are slowing down

There were more ADA ecommerce lawsuits in 2022 than in any of the four previous years, UsableNet found. Plaintiffs filed about 100 lawsuits each week, totaling 4,061, more than 70 cases per week. That number roughly kept pace with 2021, which recorded just slightly fewer with 4,011 cases. Filings seem to have leveled off after larger jumps in 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Data courtesy of UsableNet

More than 600 lawsuits in 2022, about 19% of total filings, named companies that were previously named in other ADA-related lawsuits. Sometimes the same plaintiff files a lawsuit about an ecommerce website and a second about the accompanying app, sometimes the suits are from another plaintiff, and sometimes they are against sister brands under the same parent company.

Ecommerce companies are by far the biggest risk for these lawsuits, amounting to 77% of cases, UsableNet found. The food service industry was in a distant second place, at 8% of cases.

Lawsuits target big and small retailers

The biggest ecommerce players face the most lawsuits, but retailers of all sizes are at risk, according to UsableNet. Lawsuits against companies with revenue of less than $50 million per year are on the rise, though they still make up less than one-third of total filings.

Many of the largest ecommerce retailers have already been the subjects of lawsuits and now have accessibility programs. That means plaintiffs have moved on to smaller ecommerce firms that don’t have those policies in place yet, UsableNet reported. The pandemic also pushed retailers to conduct more business online, so there are more companies to file potential lawsuits against.

Big companies are still the most at risk

The biggest ecommerce retailers remain the most likely recipients of lawsuits, according to UsableNet’s data. 20% of Digital Commerce 360’s Top 500 online retailers in 2022 were named in ADA lawsuits in 2022, and 78% of them, 391, were named in ADA digital lawsuits since 2018. Gap (No. 19), Zola (No. 326), Barnes and Noble (No. 109), and Goop (No. 156) were each named in ADA lawsuits in 2022.

Larger companies have an outsized risk of lawsuits because they tend to be more complex, with frequently changing code, and often have a physical location that makes more accessibility requirements apply, per UsableNet.

A holistic approach is best

Making an ecommerce website truly accessible is “more of an art than a science,” Level Access’ Springer told Digital Commerce 360. There’s a misconception among retailers that there’s an exact set of technical requirements that companies can meet to become totally accessible, Springer said, but that’s often not the case.

This plays out in the data, too. Some retailers use accessibility widgets to outsource making websites accessible, but that’s no guarantee that it works, or that they are safe from lawsuits. 575 of web accessibility lawsuits in 2022 named businesses using widgets, a 36% increase over 2021.

Springer says the solution must be both technical and human. Businesses will often “only get the bare minimum by focusing on compliance with the law,” he said. Instead, retailers should make a genuine effort to make a website as accessible as possible, with a goal of usability rather than simply complying with the law.

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Retailers use data to improve web conversion and improve the customer experience

Abbas Haleem — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 20:04:58 +0000

Sometimes, shoppers already know what they want to buy — and when they want it.

A prime example is buying flowers for Valentine’s Day, says Katie Hudson, content director at online flower retailer UrbanStems.

UrbanStems sells about five times its typical volume in the week leading up to Feb. 14, Hudson says. During this week, a large share of UrbanStems.com browsers are looking to buy and will convert on any page on UrbanStems.com, even the pages without the conversion-driving features the retailer added to help with year-round sales, like a countdown timer.

“The week of Valentine’s Day, the intent to purchase is so high that we’ve seen — and we’ve tested this a few times — we’ve seen people convert better on our normal shopping experience for that week because they don’t even need to know our story,” Hudson says.

But when online shoppers aren’t converting as well as retailers would like, merchants must determine what data they can use to guide shoppers to the right products. They also must identify improvements they can make to their site experience to lead shoppers to convert. Improving conversion rates is an ongoing process. Four retailers share how they’ve improved their web experience and marketing tactics to boost their conversion rates, such as by creating a faster checkout page and surfacing more engaging on-site search results.

64% of retailers said they improved their conversion rates in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a Digital Commerce 360 retailers survey of 73 online merchants in February 2023. Additionally, 22% maintained their conversion rates year over year, and just 14% had declining conversion rates. Most retailers surveyed had conversion rates of 1.51% or better.

Better than “normal.” Enhanced site tools are conversion drivers

UrbanStems is always monitoring its conversion rate, and it continually tests design features to improve conversion, Hudson says.

The “normal shopping experience” on UrbanStems.com is the baseline pages running on Salesforce’s ecommerce platform. UrbanStems also runs design feature experiments using web design vendor Zmags’ Fastr Frontend interface, which connects to the platform via an application programming interface.

The vendor allows Hudson to add new pages or custom-designed sections of pages to UrbanStems.com that aren’t limited to its ecommerce platform’s template, rather than submitting a ticket to the retailer’s web developers each time she wants or needs to make a change.

Some of those changes include adding a countdown timer, updating promo codes in real time, and the use of an inventory badge that indicates how many units of a product are available. Each change helped UrbanStems improve its conversion, Hudson says.

UrbanStems created a specific landing page with a countdown timer for Valentine’s Day for shoppers visiting the retailer after clicking on a Facebook or Instagram ad.

The UrbanStems website shows shoppers flower arrangements with the highest conversion rate first.

Flower retailer UrbanStems shows shoppers visiting from Facebook and Instagram marketing language for shoppers unfamiliar with the brand.

When UrbanStems tested a Zmags landing page versus its normal shopping product listing page, the Zmags landing page always had a higher conversion rate compared with the normal shopping page, Hudson says. Now, she tests one Zmags frontend page versus another to see how well different creatives lead shoppers to convert.

In addition to using Zmags, UrbanStems also uses Contentsquare, a digital experience analytics platform, to gather additional shopper data. Contentsquare offers a heat map that allows Hudson to see where shoppers are clicking on UrbanStems.com.

“Are people clicking more on this orange bouquet that’s $70, or are they clicking on this pink bouquet that’s $70?” Hudson says, adding that she tries “to get a sense of where people are gravitating. If we’re seeing a super-low clickthrough rate, we will update the creative in some way. Overall, we’re always monitoring conversion rate.”

Got a hunch? Time to test new features

Valentine’s Day accounts for a large chunk of annual revenue at UrbanStems. But outside of peak seasons, Hudson tests pages and market products based on hunches and trends.

One test Hudson conducted was based on delivery dates. Many of the products on UrbanStems.com are tied to a particular delivery date. Because of that, shoppers might see that certain bouquets are unavailable until a week or two after the date they browse the website. If a bouquet is unavailable, it automatically gets pushed down on the UrbanStems product listing page. But Hudson had a hunch that shoppers might not be as concerned with the delivery window. If that were true, the retailer could show top sellers at the top of the listing page regardless of the availability date, rather than expecting shoppers to scroll to the bottom of the page to find them.

“You might come to one of our landing pages and then see the peony bouquet, and then you can click it and be like, ‘Oh, I can’t get it until Feb. 21,’” Hudson says. “But what we tested was even if that was the case, we were driving a higher conversion on the landing pages where we were not tying our inventory to delivery date. It was allowing us to put the best-looking bouquets or the top-selling bouquets front and center.”

Displaying prices with discounts included spikes conversion

Wow Skin Science also added new features to its site to help with conversion. The personal care brand noticed shoppers were leaving at checkout after adding items to their carts, says Sudeep Bansal, vice president of growth.

After surveying shoppers, Bansal discovered shoppers expected their promotions to be applied to their cart before checking out. When they didn’t see the promotion applied before checkout, they would abandon their cart — and they wouldn’t return to it.

“So we introduced a widget in the cart where the offer that’s available for the customer is visible, loud and clear,” Bansal says.

“The customer could just apply that offer and move forward in the journey. We saw a significant delta in conversion rates for that,” Bansal says, declining to share the retailer’s conversion rate.

To further improve the customer experience, the site autofills a shopper’s address during the checkout process. It also provides easy navigation on the homepage so shoppers can get to the products they want quickly.

“One challenge we see is there’s too much information available on the internet today,” Bansal says. “When people come on our site, they get confused on what they want to buy. We have about 500 different SKUs listed on the site, and when the customer comes in, the customer doesn’t really know what is the right product for [them].”

Wow Skin Science alleviates this with its beauty quiz. It asks shoppers for information such as:

Age
Skin type
What scent the shopper prefers
What the shoppers’ concerns are

After finishing the quiz, shoppers receive a personalized suggestion of individual Wow Skin Science products to try as well as skincare kits. Conversion rate is higher on personalized product suggestions shoppers receive after taking the quiz, Bansal says. He attributes the increase in conversion to shoppers trusting that the suggested products will work for them. Shoppers are also given the option to automatically filter the website’s product listing page based on what the shopper filled out in the beauty quiz.

Don’t make it hard for a customer to give you money

Wrist Mafia also noticed shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts. It improved its conversion rate after optimizing its landing pages and improving checkout speed, says CEO and founder Johnny Brown. Wrist Mafia is a subscription-based retailer that allows customers to receive a new watch. The subscriptions it offers are monthly, every three months, bi-annually or annually.

Wrist Mafia’s previous interface, ReCharge, made shoppers leave the retailer’s Shopify-hosted site to complete the payment process. ReCharge had a separate processor and application built on top of Shopify, rather than an interface that integrates directly into the platform, Brown says. Shoppers couldn’t use Shop Pay or Google Autofill forms during checkout, which decreased conversion, Brown says, without sharing specifics.

“If you have to go through six pages to check out, you’ll lose most of those customers,” he says. “We did.”

Wrist Mafia’s customers can now check out in less than 10 seconds, he says, down from two to three minutes. That checkout speed improved after the retailer implemented subscription-management vendor Ordergroove’s interface in September 2022. Ordergroove helped reduce the number of pages shoppers had to navigate to subscribe by three pages, Brown says.

And to acquire new subscribers, Wrist Mafia heavily discounts the first watch in the subscription, Brown says. That discount for the first watch is the best available price other than during the Cyber 5. Cyber 5 refers to the period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday.

This conversion-driving tactic also helped Wrist Mafia grow to about 11,000 subscribers at its peak in early 2022, up from about 2,000 subscribers at the beginning of the pandemic.

Within three months of implementing Ordergroove, Wrist Mafia grew its subscriber base 63%. Its subscribers can pay monthly or prepay for three- or six-month subscriptions.

UrbanStems, Wrist Mafia and Wow Skin Science all share a similar theory in their approaches to improving their conversion rates. Make it easy on the shopper. The three merchants have improved their conversion by improving the shopper experience. And they did that by making it easy to find products and pay for them.

This is part of Digital Commerce 360’s March 2023 Strategy Insights edition. Our members have access to all the articles in this month’s issue, Data-Driven Retail.

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Online flower retailer UrbanStems increases conversion 12% during Valentine’s Day season

Abbas Haleem — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 20:49:16 +0000

Online flower retailer UrbanStems typically sells about five times its typical volume in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, said Katie Hudson, content director.

The retailer’s conversion rate increased 12% year over year for Valentine’s Day 2023. A large part of the retailer’s sales come through its customized landing pages, Hudson said, declining to provide dollar figures.

The retailer had its highest sales number on Feb. 12, Hudson said, though she declined to provide a dollar amount.

“We all knew people were going to wait until the last minute, and they did,” Hudson said.

Using a ‘Fastr Frontend’

UrbanStems is always monitoring its conversion rate, and it continually tests design features to improve conversion, Hudson says.

The “normal shopping experience” on UrbanStems.com uses Salesforce’s ecommerce platform and is limited to Salesforce templates. UrbanStems also runs design feature experiments using web design vendor Zmags’ Fastr Frontend interface, which connects to the platform via an application programming interface (API).

“It’s for a creative audience to be able to do things on those key parts of the site where your brand vision is paramount,” said Ryan Breen, chief technology officer at Zmags. “You really want to do something not restricted by templates.”

Breen said it’s typical to see a drop-off after a shopper goes to a landing page that a company put “all their effort into” creating.

“I know the moment. I’ve fallen off,” Breen said. “Hand-designed, cool site, to template hell. It’s usually right around the category page.”

There are often differences in opinion among the merchandisers, marketers and development agencies producing custom pages, Breen said.

“Everything becomes a ticket to another team to another team to another team, and you aren’t doing that in a day,” Breen said.

Changes UrbanStems makes to improve conversion

Some of the changes UrbanStems made include adding a countdown timer, updating promo codes in real time, creating shoppable tiles on the retailer’s blog, and using an inventory badge that indicates how many units of a product are available. Each change helped UrbanStems improve its conversion, Hudson said.

In the case of Valentine’s Day, the Zmags product landing page (PLP) UrbanStems created on its site resulted in a 35% increase in conversion compared with its templated PLP, Hudson said. UrbanStems tested the page from Jan. 24 to 29.

“We weren’t even expecting to run the test so short, but the numbers were so significant,” Hudson said.

The Zmags pages have tested and performed so well for UrbanStems that the retailer now tests one Zmags frontend page versus another to see how well different creative leads shoppers to convert.

UrbanStems top-selling Valentine’s Day products

“Unsurprisingly, red roses were our top seller,” Hudson said.

And the retailer saw the biggest conversion lift on SKUs in the $70 to $100 range, she said. Furthermore, people are more likely to include add-ons such as vases to their Valentine’s Day purchases, she said.

UrbanStems also orders in lower volume SKUs that have a higher price point to experiment with what shoppers are comfortable purchasing. The flower retailer offered a SKU for Valentine’s Day that was over $200 and sold out.

“Granted, we ordered at a significantly less amount, but I’m always honestly surprised to see what people are gravitating toward,” Hudson said. “I think sometimes it could be that when you see a higher price point, it feels like a more luxurious gift, which it certainly is. The over $200 price we offered had a mixture of fresh florals and orchids in it, which we’ve never done before, a bouquet with mixed orchids. It came with a vase as well. The fact that that sold out was a little surprising to me because it was something different that we’ve never sold before.”

UrbanStems also offered peonies during the Valentine’s Day season.

“Peonies overall was a huge win for us,” she said. “We actually sold out of peonies a week before Valentine’s Day.”

All those SKUs led to UrbanStems’ average order value (AOV) increasing 12% year over year around the February holiday.

Making marketing adjustments by channel

Hudson said even though UrbanStems knows the intent to purchase is “really high” leading up to Valentine’s Day, the retailer also wanted to make sure it showcased products at price points it knew shoppers were looking for based on sales data at the end of January and in early February.

It also wants to make sure it’s sorting products that are on sale or have a high buy-to-detail rate. Buy-to-detail rate is an analytic that shows the percentage of people who bought an item on a website after viewing that product’s page.

UrbanStems only used Zmags in its landing pages for shoppers coming to the site from paid social media marketing. The retailer didn’t experience any dips in conversion leading up to the holiday, Hudson said. Additionally, UrbanStems increased conversion on paid social 83% year over year.

Moreover, it spent less on paid social this year compared with 2022. Paid social transactions increased 27% year over year, she said. Those transactions come from Meta, TikTok and Pinterest. UrbanStems targeted the male audience on Meta platforms and found it responded to promo codes and the countdown timer Hudson implemented.

Those performance increases were “pretty wild for us and really exciting,” Hudson said. The next big challenge, she added, is taking those wins and applying them to its next big sales period: Mother’s Day.

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Holiday season web traffic to Top 1000 retailers drops 3.8% in 2022

James Risley — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 14:41:08 +0000

Average daily web traffic to retailers in the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 dropped 3.8% in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2022 when compared to the prior year, according to Digital Commerce 360’s analysis of Similarweb data. Traffic to ecommerce retailers has been down all year as the pandemic pressure to stay home […]

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Ecommerce traffic jumps nearly 45% during Cyber 5 compared with earlier in the month

James Risley — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 16:22:37 +0000

Visits to Top 1000 retailers’ ecommerce websites jumped 44.2% during the Cyber 5 shopping period compared to total traffic during a comparable five-day period earlier in the month, according to Digital Commerce 360 analysis of Similarweb data.

However, total web traffic to Top 1000 retailers decreased during the Cyber 5 this year compared with the Cyber 5 in 2021. Despite the traffic decrease, ecommerce sales increase during this period.

The total number of visits to retailers in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 dropped 5.9% during the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday this year, when compared to the same time last year.

Traffic has been down throughout the year, but it was down less during the Cyber 5. During a control period two weeks prior to the Cyber 5, between a Thursday, Nov. 10 and Monday, Nov. 14, total traffic was down 6.9% compared to the same Thursday-to-Monday period last year.

Total site visits over the five-day period to the full Top 1000 increase 44.2% during the five-day period compared with earlier in the month. Last year, the bump was 42.7%.

The jump in traffic wasn’t the same each day. Traffic on Black Friday increased 77.5% compared with the control period. This is a lower increase than the 80.4% increase during the comparable time frame in 2021. But in 2022, site visits increased by a larger amount on Thanksgiving and the weekend, leading to an overall higher increase in visits for the full Cyber 5 compared to last year.

Cyber 5 traffic down in 2022

Still, web traffic decreased during the 2022 Cyber 5 across the board. Top 100 retailers had bigger declines than the larger Top 1000. Top 100 retailers had a 7.6% year-over-year decrease in traffic over Cyber 5 2022 and only 42.6% growth compared to the control period earlier in the month.

Web traffic to Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1) decreased 5.1% year over year during the Cyber 5. Amazon’s traffic grew just 33.2% compared with the 2022 control period. Excluding Amazon, Top 100 traffic fell 8.8% year over year but visits increased more — 47.4% — compared to two weeks prior.

A few categories grew traffic during the Cyber 5 compared with last year: apparel and accessories increased Cyber 5 traffic 5.4%, while jewelry grew 10.5%. Sporting goods retailers increased traffic 1.9% compared with last year.

Among the Top 100, merchants with the largest year-over-year traffic increases reflected the fastest-growing categories. Chico’s FAS Inc. (No. 88), Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (No. 57) and Ascena Retail Group (No. 43) were all among the five fastest growers, while Fanatics Inc. (No. 25), Lululemon Athletica Inc. (No. 32) and Foot Locker Inc. (No. 50) made the top 10.

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Amazon outage frustrates sellers and shoppers

Gretchen Salois — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 17:56:15 +0000

For about one hour on Wednesday morning, thousands of Amazon.com Inc. shoppers received error messages during checkout.

Amazon’s message for shoppers using its app or website said the merchant was experiencing “unusually heavy traffic.”

Some Amazon sellers said they noticed an impact during the outage.

“Sales just nosedived” for part of the morning, said Ethan Goldstein, CEO of Curist, an Amazon marketplace merchant and seller of online medicine.

Curist Relief comparison of daily units ordered by hour. The red line represents units ordered on Amazon.com on Dec. 6. The blue line indicates sales for Dec. 7 during the outage.

Goldstein said on Dec. 7, from 9 a.m. ET, the number of orders decreased 95% compared with yesterday. Through 10 a.m. ET, the number of orders decreased 34% compared with the same period on Dec. 6.

“That includes some of the early morning where everything was fine,” he said.

According to Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, problems peaked at about 9:07 a.m. ET, affecting customers throughout the U.S. and worldwide. Shoppers received error messages and could not complete checkout.

Beyond Amazon’s reference to heavy traffic, the reason for the outage is unclear. When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Betsy Harden said at 10:20 a.m. ET, “We’re sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue.”

By 11:44 a.m. ET, Amazon shared, “We have resolved the issue, and everything is now running smoothly.”

Amazon.com’s outage comes two days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on Dec. 5.

Reasons for Amazon outage unknown

Sellers experienced difficult accessing the site early Dec. 7, said Fahim Naim, head of Amazon at Advantage Unified Commerce, an ecommerce consulting agency. But, the actual impact remains to be seen.

“What we can’t tell is if the drop in hourly sales per the reporting is real and due to customers not being able to access the site, or if it’s another data issue,” Naim said. “Across accounts, we see a huge dip in reported sales by hour between 7 a.m.-10 a.m. ET, but I am not clear if that is a reporting issue due to AWS also having issues this morning — or if that is real.”

Shoppers took to Twitter to voice their frustration. One Twitter user posted, “It would be nice if Amazon would admit there’s a problem. Going on half an hour now.”

Web performance vendor Blue Triangle said while it didn’t see the Amazon outage, it did notice issues around the same time as the Amazon outage for other clients the company monitors.

Blue Triangle bases its website performance ranking on metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the time a website takes to show a user the largest content on the screen, complete and ready for interaction.

Amazon is No. 1 in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 database. The Top 1000 ranks North American web merchants by web sales. It is No. 3 in the Digital Commerce 360 Online Marketplaces database, which ranks the 100 largest global marketplaces.

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Online shoppers want a fast site and their input to count

April Berthene — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 19:39:23 +0000

A fast ecommerce site is one of the top ways that retailers can offer a great customer experience, says Eric Elggren, co-founder of web-only leather accessories brand Andar. And a few seconds make all the difference to the shopper. This is especially true when a shopper doesn’t know the brand and is trying to learn […]

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Become Amazon in your space with AI/ML: Skyrocket product discovery on your B2B site

Prosenjit Sen — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:49:49 +0000

Prosenjit Sen

In my previous article — Become Amazon in your space with AI/ML: What B2B must learn from B2C — I discussed how, despite the huge promise of B2B commerce, this space faces significant challenges for both pre-sales and post-sales due to limitations of existing technologies like “search.”

In this article, let me start by first giving you a preview of the advancements in AI/ML technologies and then discuss how product discovery on your site can be easy and effortless for your customers with next-generation self-service and a powerful agent-assistant tool for your support staff. The result will be increased sales and strong, loyal relationship with customers.

Advancements in AI/ML – Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV)

Deep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning techniques that uses large neural networks trained with enormous datasets for a given space, to understand patterns in data. Once trained, a network can interpret, with high accuracy, complex sentences written in natural language processing (NLP) or identify objects and patterns in an image via computer vision (CV). These technologies can be applied to bring automation to a wide range of business use cases, resulting in increased sales, reduced cost, and a drastic increase in productivity.

Deep learning techniques have become increasingly more sophisticated in the last three years due to advancements in hardware, such as graphical processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), that allow you to quickly perform the very large matrix operations at the heart of neural network computations. For example, the GPT3 model from OpenAI is trained on about 45 Terabytes of textual data and has 175 billion parameters to perform natural language tasks rivaling human performance – e.g., it can write articles, perform a sophisticated automated conversation, and even detect the similarity between two sections of text.

Previous deep learning NLP techniques were based on RNN (recurring neural networks), a technique that had the problem of forgetting the past context – e.g., when you summarize an article you need to know the previous context. RNN would forget the previous context. This problem has now been solved by a new category of neural networks called transformers, which has led to a significant boost in the accuracy of text interpretation-based tasks such as text summarization, performing conversation, Q&A, and more. Examples of transformers includes BERT and GPT, which also require less training than RNN-based implementations. Transformers are also used for computer vision (CV), which is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to derive meaningful information from digital images.

Solving Product Discovery when a customer is looking to buy

Use Case 1: Customer is looking to buy a product with a complex spec

Consider a B2B site with over a million products, with each product having a wide range of features or attributes. The reference data probably includes a structured database with the products and their features, with each product having its own data sheets, instruction sheets, user guides and more. In addition, there is pricing, inventory, and order status that come from applications from where data needs to be accessed in real time.

Consider a customer using a self-service chatbot looking for a product with a request like this:

“I need a Hermetic thermostat with operating temperature between 100 and 300 C, pin count of 4 and that is EU RoHS compliant.”

Note: here, Hermetic refers to the manufacturer type.

To provide the answer, you need a powerful chatbot (or even voicebot) that can have a broad range of conversations with the customer, figure out in real time if there is any information missing from the query, and even have a sub-dialog if needed. Once it has the complete query, it should be able to get the answers directly from your reference data.

To provide answers from your reference data, you need an AI/ML Answer Engine on the back end that can take a complex query, interpret it, and then get answers (not documents) directly from the reference documentation — structured, un-structured, and real-time.

The chatbot should even have a memory of previous conversations to implicitly complete missing information in a query. This way, customers can easily help themselves to discover the right products and get all the necessary information they need to make a decision on the purchase — right then.

This level of sophistication is hard to provide with “search.” As a result, today you probably have live chat, voice- or email-based support — where the support engineer spends a lot of time using search and other applications to find the answers. Sometimes this could take 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes they need to seek the help of an expert.

Your customers are busy professionals; if they don’t get the right information easily, they will go somewhere else.

Note: for self-service, you can use chat or voice or upgrade your existing search with an “AI-based computational search.”

Use Case 2: Customer is looking for product features, configuration, installation and more

As I mentioned in the last section, let’s say you have a million products on your site. For each product, there are datasheets, instruction sheets, user guides, product guides, and marketing material as PDF or HTML documents. Some of these documents were prepared by your internal teams, while others may be from partners, manufacturers, or distributors. And they get updated regularly.

If the customer has questions on features, configuration, or installation, they should be able to use a self-service chatbot or a computational search interface and ask any question to get the right answer from your reference documents. They should also have a link to the exact section or page in the document (datasheet, user guide, instruction sheet, etc.) for further reference.

If they need help with troubleshooting a device, they should be able to take a picture of, say, the LED indicators on the device and input that image in the chatbot. Give them the answers, not documents to read.

Use Case 3: Customer sends email with a question; reply automatically

In B2B commerce sites, a lot of times your customers and distributors may prefer to send you an email with their questions — not only on products specs and pricing, but also on the status of an order, order replacement, or to find the location of a distributor in their area. With AI, it is now possible to interpret the email (subject and description), understand what the customer is looking for, and then to reply with an answer automatically.

Summary

Use the latest AI/ML technologies to provide customers with exactly the right products based on their specific requirements, the right answers to installation and configuration, or even help them troubleshoot issues themselves with high accuracy, using self-service, or with the help of a live agent who is equipped with AI-based productivity tools. The result will be long lasting customer loyalty and high employee retention.

In the next article I will be writing about post-sales support — how you can provide a highly sophisticated service to customers post purchase.

About the Author:

Prosenjit Sen is a serial entrepreneur and currently the CEO of Quark.ai, an “autonomous support” platform that uses deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision (CV) to bring automation to sales support and field support. He was previously employee No. 5 as part of the founding team of Informatica, a pioneer in online data integration technology. Prosenjit is a mentor for the Alchemist Accelerator and the Bay Area IIT Startups Accelerator. And he is the co-author of the book “RFID for Energy & Utility Industries.”

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Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact editor Paul Demery at paul@digitalcommerce360.com and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.

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Amazon outage frustrates sellers and shoppers

Reasons for Amazon outage unknown

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Online shoppers want a fast site and their input to count

Become Amazon in your space with AI/ML: Skyrocket product discovery on your B2B site

Advancements in AI/ML – Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV)

Solving Product Discovery when a customer is looking to buy

Use Case 1: Customer is looking to buy a product with a complex spec

Use Case 2: Customer is looking for product features, configuration, installation and more

Use Case 3: Customer sends email with a question; reply automatically

Summary

About the Author:

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