Accelerating e-commerce with value-driven software development

Digital commerce (E-commerce) has revolutionized how businesses and consumers interact, offering convenience, reach, and data-driven insights. However, companies must be prepared to compete and handle logistics in this digital landscape. It is a good idea to stay updated with the latest trends and technologies in the e-commerce industry to continue to thrive in the digital commerce world.

Evolution of e-commerce and market size

Before the pandemic and internet revolution, the e-commerce industry was struggling to grow its turnaround market and revenues. Amazon and Flipkart are major players in the e-commerce industry which hold 65% share of the total e-commerce business in India. When E-commerce started, they gave people a lot of offers and home delivery free of cost to trigger a certain behavior to purchase the products online.

But as the behavior is adopted by the people, a lot of companies have started selling business online and the market size is growing rapidly.

According to a report by Statista, the global e-commerce market size was valued at $3.9 trillion in 2019 and is expected to reach $6.5 trillion by 2023. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to online shopping, resulting in an increase in the e-commerce market size. As people were forced to stay at home, they turned to online shopping as a way to purchase goods and services.

Test and Integrate learnings

A Business research community found that 50 percent of companies whose revenue growth is in the top 10 percent are more effective than their industry peers at testing ideas, measuring results, and executing changes to products, services, and ways of working.

To test the ideas, it’s better to reach out to a specific target audience with the idea, collect the data, behavior, and feedback, and learn the user needs to be based on the available data. Also, I would like to mention that successful testing is an acceptance of failure as the cost of uncovering new knowledge.

As per the DKIW pyramid, to uncover knowledge it’s important to collect real-time data of your customers which can be converted into information which easier to measure, visualize and analyze for a specific purpose.

Integrate learnings:

At top-performing companies, the higher management continuously searches for and identifies tools that can accelerate performance. Learning about technologies and practices that can help their businesses grow is part of their daily routines. They also spread this knowledge to every corner of the organization. Building a culture of learning, exchanging ideas, and providing platforms help organizations to grow. For example, upskill a team in the company in online sales and marketing fundamentals. Also, partner with an expert which can help with the right guidance and skills and ensure that knowledge is transferred to the right people in the organization.

Treat customer satisfaction as a primary business goal

Successful digital researchers treat customer satisfaction as a primary goal. Practically, they invest in identifying frictions and mitigating them. The best companies focus on their customers needs. To drive this focus, they use data and analytics to synchronize the e-commerce experience with physical stores, social media, inside sales, customer care, customer-facing channels, fast searching, quick recommendation and easy checkouts, and other customer-facing areas.

When Covid-19 hit, a lot of gyms started virtual exercise plans and delivered a lot of related products to their customer’s doorsteps. Also, Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal started contactless delivery as well as started showing related instructions on the app to ensure the customer’s safety. These actions earn customer’s trust in the brand and building a trusted brand requires continuous efforts to keep customers in the focus.

Any effort to rapidly scale an e-commerce business requires significant resources, from new kinds of talent to data analytics to IT infrastructure. While those resources are important, we believe that a learning mindset that values perfection over speed, embraces failure as much as success, and you can start the change today. Without that mindset, all the resources in the world will not result in a truly digital organization.