eCommerce Best Practices

According to comScore, US retail commerce, for two quarters in a row, surpasses $50 billion in the first quarter of 2013. This means ecommerce have grown 13 % Quarter-on-Quarter and Year-on-Year basis.

“The first quarter of 2013 was fairly strong for online retailers, with total e-commerce sales surpassing $50 billion for only the second time on record,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “As long as job growth continues and consumer sentiment remains positive, the outlook for e-commerce in 2013 remains bright.”

The proliferation of ecommerce has been dramatic in the last ten years (2003-2013). Several companies came up, thrived and some are history now. So has been the technology. What was the best in 2003 is no longer good enough. Corra has come up with an infograhic to explain this is detailed and visual way. The same infograhic is placed below.

Driven by the power of B2B transactions, South Korean Ecommerce sales reach an all-time high of 1,144 trillion won (US$ 1.05 trillion) in 2012. This is a 14.5% increase from 999.6 won (US$ 920 billion) in 2011, according to KOSAT (Statistics Korea).

Business-to-business (B2B) sales accounted for more than 90 percent of all online transactions, hitting 1,051 trillion won (US$967 billion) and up 15.1 percent from the year before. Business-to-government (B2G) sales reached 62.26 trillion won (US$57.3 billion), up by 6.6 percent from the previous year.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) sales increased 6 percent to register 19.64 trillion won (US$18.1 billion), while consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sales leaped 20.6 percent to hit 11.8 trillion won (US$10.9 billion).

KOSTAT also pointed out that consumer online shopping, comprising B2C and C2C sales, grew 11.3 percent to 32.35 trillion won (US$29.8 billion) in 2012.

In US, the travel ecommerce spending has reached $100 billion, for the first time, in 2012.  Hotels have been outpaced by Airlines, as far as growth is concerned.

Air travel dominated e-commerce spending with a 65% share of the nearly $103 billion in spending. Air travel grew 10% to $66.5 billion, besting the next largest sector, hotels (19% share), which saw spending increase at a 7% pace to nearly $19.4 billion.

The assessments of winners and losers, and the U.S. travel e-commerce sales estimates come from comScore as it released its 2012 numbers, with the category growing 10% to $103 billion, topping the magic $100 billion mark for the first time.

Car rentals (9% share of the market) grew a tad slower than hotels and were considerably more sluggish than airlines, with car rental e-commerce sales in the U.S. rising 6% to nearly $9.7 billion, according to comScore.

Two smaller categories, travel packages (5% share) and “other travel” (2% share), grew on par with airlines at a 10% pace. comScore estimate consumer spending on travel packages at $5.1 billion, and other travel, which could include a bit of cruise, as well as tours and activities, at $2.2 billion.

Orlando based Channel Intelligence, an ecommerce company announced that it out be acquired by the search engine giant Google Inc.

“For over 10 years, we have focused on making it easy for consumers to find and buy products online and help our clients grow their business. We’ve worked with Google for years, and look forward to the great things we will be able to do together,” said channel intelligence on its blog.

ICG group, the parent company of Channel Intelligence confirmed this deal through a separate press release. According to that, Google agreed to buy the company for $125 million in cash and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013. Read more

According to comScore, the 2012 holiday spending has reached $42 billion, 14% better than 2011. Another interesting stat is that 4 days (Individually) including cyber Monday (November 26 – $1.46 billion) and Green Monday (December 10 – $1.25 billion) have surpassed $1 billion mark.

The Thanksgiving weekend set the tone for the holiday season with a strong spending of $1.18 billion (November 24-25). Black Friday (November 23) and Free Shipping day (December 17) didn’t miss out either. The too posted a strong spending of $1.042 billion and $1.013 billion respectively.

“The 2012 online holiday season was once again a very strong season with growth rates in the mid-teens as we reached record-setting spending levels,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. ” Read more

E-commerce might be one of the most eye-catching trades in 2012 with all the price wars, spars, and series of good or not-so-good rumors, and it’s evident that in the coming year the industry would be a good play, as long as you placed the right bet. In an aim to help you capture a whiff of the market in next year, Chinese portal site Tencent made some predictions about the market listed below:

Mergers & Acquisitions

In 2013, vast expansion will be the major theme for Chinese etailers, coupled with many mergers and acquisitions. The relationship among companies is likely to be ‘me in you and you in me’, forming a more complex structure as verticals (OKbuy.com) or even B2Cs (Dangdang.com) are moving to other bigger platforms like TMall or Tencent’s B2C site.

Stricter Oversight

Nowadays e-commerce has been an important channel of merchandise circulation, but many problems remain unsolved, including tax, license, fake products and so on. The industry has already drawn much attention from the government in 2012, and the corresponding policies are around the corner in 2013. Stricter oversight will be arriving sooner or later in the new year. Read more

Source –  GetElastic