E-Commerce heute: Vor welchen Herausforderungen stehen die Unternehmen jetzt?

Interview mit Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer bei commercetools

Im ersten Teil dieses Interviews habe ich mit Kelly Goetsch über den aktuellen Stand des E-Commerce gesprochen und einen Blick in die Zukunft geworfen. In diesem Teil konzentrieren wir uns auf die Herausforderungen, denen sich Marken und Retail-Unternehmen derzeit in ihrem Bestreben, online zu verkaufen, gegenüberstehen. Das Interview habe ich auf Englisch geführt.

Dennis: You said that digital natives will only do shopping online. However I know a case in Poland where a retail company combined the old with the new: The shoe retailer eobuwie.pl. They started as a small stationery shop that went online and gradually expanded their online shop internationally with local domains. But then they found out that people still want to have the physical experience of trying on the shoes, feeling them and looking at them from all angles. So, they opened showrooms in shopping centers across Poland where they have a limited choice of shoes, maybe the bestsellers, and you can try them on. You can even measure your feet with a digital measurement device and literally get your digital footprint. With this footprint, you can compare online which shoes will fit your foot. In that physical showroom, you still go online, either via your smartphone or via their own terminals. Essentially, you are visiting their online shop while you are sitting in their physical showroom, ordering what you want and then going home without anything, waiting for the home delivery the next day. 

Kelly: That is what I mean. If you have gone furniture shopping recently, that is what furniture shopping has become. That is what a lot of shopping is. You go to a physical showroom, pick out the goods and then they deliver it to you later.

Dennis: So, eCommerce will become more dominant, and customer behavior is changing, especially with digital natives. They expect everything to be online. These are, of course, huge challenges that both retailers, like brick & mortar stores, and brands must face. Maybe you can expand on these challenges?

Kelly: I think the biggest challenge is the fact that many of these organizations and many of the people running these organizations are not digitally native themselves. And it is hard to compete against these new digitally native vertical brands. There is a whole crop of VC-backed brands that sell direct-to-consumer. It is hard to compete with them online if your business was not set up that way to begin with. As a result, many organizations release technical updates of their online presence once a month and think that this is great. But digitally native vertical brands release to production 10 times a day. They are running at different levels and the businesses are set up for different metrics. That is one challenge.