Current and Future eCommerce Challenges

People's behavior in researching buying related information and decision making has changed during the last months. Their favorite methods include researching buying related price comparison sites, RSS-feeds, review sites, blogs and travel sites, while consumer generated content and peer-reviews have a huge impact on their decision making.

• Easy Structure to Strategy 2.0 Evaluation

eCommerce is moving "full steam ahead" and is years away from saturation, with double-digit growth expected for several years. However directing the creation of new marketing tools and steering the execution of marketing and technology programs, successfully driving growth in targeted markets through implementation of key projects, building and guiding top-performing teams means to embrace the Web's unique strength, interaction and participation. Web 2.0 features increase brand loyalty and customer retention and easy to use tools have a huge impact on the way people and companies interact in communications, digital media and business. Here some challenges:

• Leveraging network effects (ratings, peer-reviews): Making interaction commercially successful requires users to create wonderful things. An active creator today can enhance brand visibility and credibility, achieve customer intimacy or just simplify the process to find the latest information about new products and services allowing visitors to subscribe via RSS and be notified when posting something new. While traditional media have content embedded making it only consumable at a certain time new media enhance the customer experience unfurling channels, formats and devices. Customers communicating with customers has triggered an unprecedented social networking phenomenon and a resurgence in the Long Tail economy.
• Reducing shopping cart & checkout abandonment (RIAs): Building the case, AJAX Web-applications provide enormous advantages compared to conventional Web-applications, they avoid slow response times and scrolling after the page has reloaded thus improve end-user productivity, lower bandwidth consumption and costs by partial page updates and reduce the time to wait for the next page. Applied to eCommerce systems AJAX even increases revenues making new applications easy and intuitive reducing the amount of friction for end-users.
• Reducing the barriers to purchase across sites (payments): Customers like to buy what they want wherever they are and a single personal checkout like Google Checkout provides an experience that centralizes and stores payment information and purchase history across several merchants for buyers and extends reach and enhances security for sellers and showed that a centralization on behalf of a user simplifies the checkout process, leads to more sales and returns customers thus Google Checkout is a wonderful new thing that really can improve one's digital lifestyle. Incorporating more popular payment methods respecting local payments preferences beyond the credit card would be a good differentiator especially in smaller countries where it's competitor PayPal does not.
• Focusing on core competencies (software as a service): The Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups resulting in improved social networking technologies fostering creativity and self-expression, service orientation and cinematic user interfaces based on AJAX and Flash complementing modern SOA's and require new ways of thinking and skills, including strategy, creative and technology for a successful approach. It's no longer necessary to build all eCommerce software inhouse.
  
• Productivity (wikis, web-apps): In an enterprise employees usually are organized in different roles around issues and it's always been messy to collaborate on projects created with MS Office products and to share them with co-workers. The better that there is applications like Google Apps Premier Edition with new administration APIs aimed at businesses for the next-generation communication and collaboration. The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web and it's a step further to a Web-based collaboration-suite with drastically reduced maintenance costs with an option to buy further premium services. Blogs and wikis are inevitable requirements for a modern work group.