Consumer behavior has changed in many ways over the past few years. For example, online shopping remains as important a factor in a brand's success as the in-store experience. And while “buy online, pick up in-store” services born during the pandemic remain popular with shoppers, consumers are craving faster delivery.
Here, Sharon Gee, SVP of Sales and Partnerships at Feedonomics, a BigCommerce company, discusses these trends, the rise of omnichannel shopping, and how Feedonomics can help brands succeed in the new era of retail.
WWD: How has the pandemic changed retail? How, where and why are consumers shopping the way they are?
Sharon Gee: It's no surprise that the retail industry has seen a major shift in prioritization towards digital technology during the pandemic. Lockdowns and safety concerns have given retailers no choice but to change the way they sell and retain customers, at a time when e-commerce has boomed as the primary shopping method.
In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Retail Survey release, in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, e-commerce sales increased by $244.2 billion, or 43%, from $571.2 billion in 2019 to $815.4 billion in 2020.
Fast forward to 2023, and global retail e-commerce sales will reach an estimated $5.8 trillion. Forecasts suggest that this figure is expected to grow 39 percent over the next few years, reaching more than $8 trillion by 2027.
As brick-and-mortar foot traffic increases again and digital commerce takes hold, retailers are pushing hybrid shopping models that seamlessly integrate in-store and online shopping to meet consumer purchasing behaviors and expectations. Consumers' new shopping mindset is driven by a desire for speed and convenience. This change is being driven by retailers and marketplaces that are innovating out of necessity to survive the pandemic.
Take BOPIS as one example of convenience. The pandemic has significantly accelerated the adoption of BOPIS by retailers around the world, but it's clear that its impacts are lasting: BOPIS will account for 10.1% of e-commerce sales in 2023, representing an 18.1% year-over-year increase from 2022. This trend indicates that the convenience-focused habits formed during the pandemic, such as BOPIS, digital wallets, and one-click checkout, are here to stay, even as consumers return to brick-and-mortar stores.
There's also a growing demand for fast, same-day delivery, with consumers expecting to receive their purchases within an hour, or even hours. Instant Commerce meets this need and helps retailers scale to meet these rapidly growing expectations.
WWD: As consumer demand for omnichannel shopping grows, what should retailers and brands consider to deliver a positive shopping experience?
SG: The secret to success will depend on retailers having a well-executed omnichannel strategy in place to meet shoppers where they are and provide a seamless experience across every touchpoint that drives engagement, brand loyalty and ultimately, conversion.
Consumers shop in many ways: in-store, search, brand websites, social media, affiliate programs, marketplaces, and more. To be discovered across all channels, retailers need to optimize their product data to ensure shoppers can accurately search for them. Incomplete or inaccurate data can have a lasting, negative impact on performance across all channels, including search and marketplaces. This often results in products appearing for the wrong keywords, or worse, not appearing at all.
Rather than bombarding consumers with blanket brand messaging and generic product offerings, a focus on a strategic omnichannel data strategy puts the customer at the center of the experience, understands them better and allows retailers to deliver exactly the products they want, where they are.
Leveraging a data orchestration platform for feed management, like Feedonomics, a BigCommerce subsidiary, the world's leading retailers can harmonize and optimize their product catalogs, inventory, pricing, and order data to improve conversions across channels, resulting in better advertising performance and increased product sales. This is especially important in the fashion and apparel sector, where thousands of product catalogs are distributed to dozens of third-party marketplaces and social channels.
WWD: How does the Feedonomics platform work, and what does “platform-agnostic” mean?
SG: Feedonomics is the leader in data feed management for 30% of the top 1,000 Internet retailers, including Badgley Mischka, New Balance, On, Good American, Ganni and Ted Baker, who list their products on hundreds of today's leading online shopping sites. Feedonomics is a powerful product feed management platform that aggregates, standardizes and optimizes product data from various sources to offer a range of solutions to meet the unique requirements of different online marketplaces and advertising channels, ultimately improving the performance of those channels.
If product data is the new oil, then Feedonomics is the refinery. Feedonomics leverages AI and channel and category expertise to transform product data into the format you need, and continuously monitors and updates feeds to optimize product listing performance, ensuring data accuracy and consistency across platforms like Amazon, eBay, Target Plus, Google, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. As a result, retailers and brands can effectively manage their omnichannel presence and reduce the complexity of maintaining accurate product listings across numerous channels to drive conversions and improve return on ad spend.
Even though Feedonomics is owned by BigCommerce, a key differentiator is that it is platform agnostic, meaning it can take data from almost anywhere – API, CSV, FTP, JSON – transform and enrich it at scale, and send it wherever it needs to be in real time. For example, it can take product data from any ecommerce platform or PIM, transform it, and send it to hundreds of advertising channels and marketplaces to streamline product listings, feed optimization, data syncing, and order management, providing unmatched flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
WWD: Can you explain your value proposition for retailers, brands and marketplaces?
SG: One of the key benefits of Feedonomics is that it can significantly increase product awareness and conversion rates, improving your return on advertising spend. [or ROAS]Feedonomics helps leading brands and retailers increase conversion rates by an average of 10-20 percent, whether ROAS or direct sales, by mapping and transforming product data to be compatible with platforms like Amazon and Google, while facilitating seamless inventory updates across multiple channels to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of product listings.
Sharon Gee
Another key benefit of Feedonomics is its time-saving features. Many companies manually manage complex product data consisting of thousands of SKUs, often requiring dedicated personnel for each platform. Feedonomics automates this process, saving companies significant time and money.
Simply put, partnering with Feedonomics allows businesses to focus on their core competencies while ensuring product data optimization and efficient management of e-commerce channels, resulting in improved performance and results.
WWD: What kind of partner program do you offer and how does it work?
SG: Feedonomics offers an omnichannel Certified Partner Program that connects merchants to a vast network of agency and technology partners. The program increases channel benefits and conversion rates for merchants, provides growth opportunities for agents, and drives adoption by technology and channel partners — making it a win-win for everyone. Partners include leading technology companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok, as well as leading agencies such as WPP and Deloitte Digital.
Members of the Omnichannel Certified Partner Program have access to exclusive alpha and beta programs, accelerated approvals, advertising credits, and white glove onboarding to optimize your product listings to reach more customers, improve channel performance, and save time.
Additionally, partners receive growth consulting, workshop invitations, support from the channel team, competitive pricing, and the ability to streamline business operations and improve user experience.
WWD: How is Feedonomics using generative AI?
SG: With the number of channels growing every day, brands and retailers' ability to leverage AI for fast and accurate product data syndication can have a huge impact on their scalability. Feedonomics has been leveraging AI long before it became a buzzword. The platform uses FeedAI's advanced algorithms to automate and optimize product data management across various e-commerce channels, enabling a robust, scalable solution that delivers superior results for brands and retailers.
Additionally, the alpha feature allows users to specify prompts and have the results built directly into the feed. This approach accelerates time to market by handling much of the heavy lifting at scale, and also reduces operational costs.
WWD: What is “instant commerce” and why is it important?
SG: The growing trend of instant commerce means brick-and-mortar retailers can expose their in-store inventory to various online channels and offer fast, same-day delivery. With 90% of U.S. online shoppers expecting free shipping within two to three days according to a McKinsey & Company study, instant commerce captures a fundamental consumer truth: they want what they want, now.
It's no secret that fast delivery and BOPIS options are highly attractive services that consumers want to avail. Brick-and-mortar brands need to be able to scale to meet rapidly growing customer demand. The rise of instant commerce has evolved the e-commerce ecosystem to fulfill omnichannel priorities by bridging the gap between online purchases and getting the goods to customers as quickly as possible.
Companies like Feedonomics partner with well-known platforms like Amazon Today, Walmart LocalFinds, DoorDash Uber, and Instacart to help retailers capture additional revenue streams with their Instant Commerce programs. For brands with brick-and-mortar stores, Instant Commerce partners enable them to offer both in-store pickup and fast same-day delivery, helping to increase GMV, build brand loyalty, reach more customers, and improve product discoverability in search rankings.
Retailers that are located near major metropolitan areas, have at least five retail locations, have an average sales price above $25, and already sell on marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash will benefit most from Instant Commerce.
To maximize these benefits, retailers must prioritize advanced logistics and real-time inventory management, accelerate time to market, improve performance with higher quality product data, and increase scalability and flexibility — all of which are essential to meet today's ever-changing consumer expectations and stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital economy.
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