Ecommerce

This was a busy week for web developers, marketers, and users of both Episerver and Ektron. This was the week where many that follow these platforms converged in Las Vegas for EPiServer Ascend 2015. I didn't attend the customer conference, but from what I have been told and what I have read is that people walked away from this conference impressed. It is also at this conference that the Fall 2015 release of the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud was announced.

Challenge for retailers is to balance sites with richer content, making them responsive across every device while being efficient to navigate

Understanding the trade-off between complexity of technology and simplicity of experience online is a battleground for strategists and marketers alike when it comes to attracting Generation Consumer. This is according to Tryzens, a leading provider of digital commerce and retail managed service solutions, which has conducted research into the priority and relevance of eCommerce features.

My first thought when seeing this infographic backed by TrackingCourier.com on the potential growth in the Ecommerce space was: sorry not interesting enough to post here. But after a few days, the infographic has grown on me and made me think that the opportunities to sell goods and services online is as strong as ever. 

Little attention has been given to B2B Ecommerce until now. In the last decade, B2B commerce industry has witnessed huge traction in user base and sales, and still continues to do so today. Decision makers are doing digital searches and purchases rather than browsing through catalogs and placing orders through sales representatives. We consume more information in a day than what our ancestors did in a lifetime. As the Ecommerce industry continues to evolve, we are watching for the latest trends and list four ways you can improve the B2B Ecommerce buying experience.

For the small to medium sized business (SME), there are many more eCommerce options available today. If you want to build an online store, you can expect to find a solution that will allow you to develop your shopping cart or eStore as part of an overall website, and provide a secured buying experience, payment gateways, product catalogs, email accounts, marketing tools, sales reports, and reasonable mobile optimization.

One such eCommerce framework is Bigcommerce, which is growing in popularity and expanding its reach. Bigcommerce developers can work with free or premium themes (some themes are priced at $140, and some are as much as $250).

Competition in the retail world is as cutthroat as ever. With so many retailers out there, the race is on to reach as many customers as possible with the best offers possible. Businesses that go into this race expecting to use traditional methods, however, will quickly find themselves falling behind the rest of the pack. We live in a much different world now where customers are more knowledgeable and empowered than ever before. Thanks to the internet, consumers can find out all they want to know about specific products before ever deciding to purchase them. This has forced retailers to raise their game when it comes to wooing current and prospective customers.

Content marketing is everywhere. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a marketer who isn’t seeing the impact of content marketing on their discipline.

Content Marketing is Growing. Fast.

Whether they’re B2B businesses, B2C businesses or even government agencies and nonprofits, enterprise sized organizations are going digital, and finding their online publishing needs looking increasingly like the needs of digital publishers.  

Almost a year ago to this date, Sitecore and Microsoft announced they would collaborate on an offering to bring the best of experience marketing and commerce together. Today, Sitecore announced at the National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention in New York the availability of Sitecore Commerce 8 powered by Microsoft Dynamics. This solution is intended to enable enterprises to bridge the gap between in-store and digital experiences.

Kentico, a provider in Web content and customer experience management,  just released a new version of their content management system, Kentico 8.2. This new version provides several new and improved features with the primary focus on collaboration and ecommerce. Kentico 8.2 also offers improvements that the software developers believe will help businesses launch and manage digital marketing campaigns faster and easier than previous versions.

Over the years, I've talked about building a range of simple websites for personal use to implementing very complicated proprietary and open source enterprise content management systems. What I haven't talked about is the cost of building and maintaining those websites. Honestly, I've been too embarrassed for how little I spend and too stunned by the price tag for what the big companies pay for their websites. Who Is Hosting This? sent us a graphic that we thought represented the typical costs small to medium size businesses can expect when building and hosting their new websites. So good was the infographic that we decided to post it here.