Direct-to-Consumer Headwinds: An Opportunity for Change in eCommerce For us in eCommerce, to say the last 4 years has been a rollercoaster would be an understatement. Flashback to 2018, with a record $3.6 billion VC dollars invested
Building Customer Trust Around Pre-orders: Understanding the FTC’s Pre-order Regulations At Purple Dot, we see brands turning to pre-orders for a wide variety of reasons to boost their business. Ultimately, all of these diverse use cases generally boil down to
When it comes to pre-orders, what wait time is worth it? At Purple Dot, we often listen as brands debate the age-old pre-order question: Will our customers be willing to wait? And if so, how long? And it’s natural that
Stockouts and Retail Reality in 2022: Never Going Out of Stock Is Now a Customer Expectation Never going out of stock is now a customer expectation. Special emphasis on “never,” with plenty of evidence to support that statement. We’ve said in other posts that when
Increasing Drop Frequency in DTC Fashion E-Commerce 2022: Fewer Constraints, Better Inventory Control, and Greater Engagement About six months ago, we published a post on the surge in DTC e-commerce growth and the factors driving it. In that post, we spent some time talking about drop
Predictions, Problems, and Pundits: e-Commerce Retail in 2022 Now that the new year has cleared the starting gate, we’re thinking about what 2022 may bring for e-commerce retail, especially after a year like 2021. Last year taught
Black Friday 2021: Retail Roulette in the Year of Living Uncertainly Hello again. We’re writing this post on Monday, November 29, 2021. Friday was Black Friday, and today is Cyber Monday. We were just thinking about what those days actually
Supply Chain Problems for Christmas 2021: Ports Cause a Storm of Retail Uncertainty In our last post, we talked about whether the coming holiday season was likely to be a retail feast for brands and vendors, or a period of serious and unanticipated
E-Commerce Christmas 2021: Retail Feast or Famine for Online Markets? Christmas 2021 is fast approaching, and e-commerce retailers should be engaged in answering those key questions: have I been naughty or nice, and what is Santa likely to bring me
Doubling Down on the Direct-to-Consumer Channel: Drop Frequency, Regularized Revenues, and Enriched Customer Journeys We’re currently in the third quarter of 2021, and there are excellent reasons for the ongoing surge we’re seeing in the growth of DTC (direct-to-consumer) e-commerce. Not surprising,
How to Master E-Commerce Retail Pre-Ordering in 2021: Grow Your Revenues, Control Your Inventory, and Build Untouchable Brand Loyalty – Part 2 In our last post, we invited you to revisit with us the whole business of e-commerce retail pre-ordering, a wonderful concept that has generally failed to live up to its
How to Master E-Commerce Retail Pre-Ordering in 2021: Grow Your Revenues, Control Your Inventory, and Build Untouchable Brand Loyalty The days of old-fashioned inventory management and guaranteed long-term supply-chain reliability are mostly gone. If we’ve learned anything in the last couple of years, it’s that change truly
E-Commerce Live Streaming in 2021: Visual Keys to the Future E-commerce has been riding a wave of profound change for the last year and half or so. The water’s been turbulent, and there have been frequent wipe-outs. It takes
Hyper-Personalisation and Searchandising in 2021: What You See Really Is What You Want “Hyper-personalisation” and “searchandising” are not new terms. The concepts underlying them have formed the bases for some critical e-commerce marketing strategies for quite a while. Old news… So why are
The New Retail’s Sustainability Race 2021: Are Marketers Falling Behind? One of the new retail’s most important realities is that the focus on sustainability is intensifying. This is true in every sector, and in every aspect of consumers’ retail
Sharpening Your Focus and Achieving Your Retail Goals: Choosing the Best KPIs for E-Commerce In a retail world driven by an unquenchable thirst for meaningful data to improve sales and ROI, there have been profound changes recently. Online competition for shoppers and completed transactions
The Evolution of Online Marketing: Privacy, Cookies & Uncertainty Cookies can be very tasty – especially well-designed marketing cookies that allow e-commerce retailers to gather and use customer data to shape their retail strategies. Third-party cookies have long been critical
Hot E-Commerce Intimacy: The Push for Greater Customer Experience Personalization in 2021 CX personalization is an exploding e-commerce trend that’s going to be with us for a long time. In fact, it’s a little like Pandora’s Box: now that
Core Web Vitals Are Here: Great SEO Metrics, or New Reasons to Pick On Google? It’s May of 2021, and e-commerce retailers – along with everybody else – are about to face Google’s latest SEO metrics: Core Web Vitals, which will be part of Google’
Empathy, Emotional Connection, and Retail Survival in 2021: the Heart of the Matter? “Empathy in retail” has become a buzz-phrase that’s critical for both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retailers for 2021. If you’re in retail, you’ve already figured out that 2020
Guarding the Gates of Online Retail: Cyberattacks and Payment Fraud in 2021 “Cybersecurity” is a catch-all expression that covers a world of processes, practices, applications and hardware in every form and flavor imaginable. Whatever their specific functions and operational scope, they share
Where’s My Stuff: Supply Chain Issues Impacting Online Retailers in 2021 Supply chain issues for online retailers will definitely be front and center in 2021. The reasons for this should be clear, but some e-commerce retailers continue to be slow to
worth-the-wait 4 Top Brand Storytelling Trends for E-Commerce Retailers in 2021 Brand storytelling trends are evolving for 2021, and it’s becoming clear that nuanced, creative brand stories are earning more respect from e-commerce retailers – and their shoppers – than in the
Risk Mitigation for 2020 and Beyond: Rewriting the Rules of Retail Among other lessons the global pandemic is forcing on the retail industry, two stand out. First, if you’re a retailer, it’s time to forget whatever definitions you’ve
Three Discount Dangers for Luxury Brands in 2020: The Real Costs of Exclusivity The exclusivity and high prices of luxury brands involve risks for retailers in 2020. No luxury brand is immune from the retail upheavals of a post-COVID world. The risks might
