Proof pandemic is driving eCommerce (not required)

It has been obvious for some time that the current pandemic circumstances will be a boon to some industries and a lag to others. eCommerce is one of those boons (read more about how US Post office is perhaps suffering as a result).

The following chart from WSJ shows Q2 revenue numbers from a handful of major retailers including Amazon and underscores the phenomenal growth in their eCommerce revenues over the same period. eCommerce is in high gear!

What is a digital strategy?

If you have ever been asked to create or participate in such an activity you may have immediately turned to Google to find a template or wiki definition, or perhaps you smartly realized strategy is not so easy or well defined. In practice, strategy is hard! However, with hard-work and some key knowledgeable and willing participation a lot can be accomplished. Strategy isn’t really like cooking, but if it were….Simply gather as many inputs (internal and external) as you can find, fill in the gaps from your organization’s knowledge of customers, financials, etc., mix all of this together with stakeholders, customer input, workshops and assessments, then bake quickly to produce some ‘living’ documents. For example, a minimal digital strategy for any organization should produce (then maintain) a Vision (what we want to be), Roadmap (how to play), Capability from/to (where to play) and Dashboard/ KPIs (how we measure).

What does $2.8B buy you? Salesforce and Demandware

Salesforce has made a strong (and not-cheap) venture into the world of eCommerce. Salesforce is an established cloud platform provider – focused on the CRM space, offering  Service, Sales and Marketing Cloud tools. Today it  has plugged a long time gap in its platform – namely Commerce by buying Demandware – a cloud eCommerce platform (src. Techcrunch.com June 1st 2016). This allows Salesforce to firmly compete in the Commerce space, pitching it against the likes of the “all powerful” Amazon, eBay and Magento to name by a few.  Interestingly, the combined Salesforce company platform can cover Sales, Marketing, Service and Commerce capabilities for an organization – all via cloud based solutions – reliving a organization from the need to invest in its own on-premises infrastructure.  Salesforce isn’t new to acquisitions – and pundits may note it’s track record of integrating these acquisitions technically often lags far behind the initial closing of the financial transaction.

At Connected Agency, we believe in the power of connected customer journeys to propel your brand (and it’s revenues) forward. For organizations laser focused on omni-channel customer success,  this $2.8B acquisition could be a serious future platform contender (or bring new capabilities to existing customers).  According to Gartner , it “estimates that worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is expected to grow at over 14 percent annually, reaching $8.544 billion by 2020, according to figures provided by Salesforce.”