Ecommerce & Marketplaces Newsletter – Nov 11th, 2022
Welcome to the 79th edition of the “Ecommerce & Marketplaces” weekly newsletter. We are delighted to announce that we have been named “Partner of the Year” for the mid-market segment by leading composable commerce platform commercetools. Awarded during commercetools’ annual Partner Summit in Austin, Texas, the recognition punctuates a rapidly growing partnership between the two organizations that formally launched in January 2021. The association also includes multiple mutual customers and regular collaborations at industry events, including a social event collaboration at the upcoming B2B Online event in Orlando, Florida. The home stretch of the Holiday season is almost here, and there are both expectations and fears as we head into it. Digital Commerce 360 predicts that U.S. consumers’ digital spending in November and December 2022 will grow a modest 6.1% compared to last year. Inflation will limit consumer spending and force many to trade down or hunt for bargains. Get more details in the DC360 story. Blomberg has a fresh take on Alibaba Singles Day as it happens. A slump in consumer confidence over heightened scrutiny on internet firms and frequent Covid lockdowns has hurt Single Day sales. Due to the crackdown on influencer celebrities, live-streaming shopping has lost some of its sheens. Alibaba Group, the tech giant that dominates Singles’ Day, is expected to post a flat growth from this year’s event. Marketplace.org has an insightful take on how platform rules shape where people “live” online. Some social media users stay loyal to Twitter but join smaller platforms, like Mastodon or Truth Social, based on their content moderation rules. This is a transcript from Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams’s conversation with Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University, who studies online communities and speech. The New York Times article reports that Amazon is freezing its corporate hiring for the retail business, the latest of many tech companies pulling back amid economic uncertainty. This affects Amazon’s physical and online retail business and its logistics operations. Pattern’s blog looks at “The Three Phases of Online Marketplace Internationalisation.” It discusses what consumer brands need to think when considering whether marketplaces should be a key channel within their international eCommerce strategies. Read this and more in this week’s edition.
Notable news from the past week
McFadyen Digital Named 2022 Commercetools Partner Of The Year For Mid-Market
McFadyen Digital, the leading global ecommerce marketplace agency, has been named “Partner of the Year” for the mid-market segment by leading composable commerce platform commercetools. Awarded during commercetools’ annual Partner Summit in Austin, Texas, the recognition punctuates a rapidly growing partnership between the two organizations that formally launched January 2021. As inaugural members of the MACH Alliance, the partnership between McFadyen and commercetools was born out of a shared commitment to the notion that a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) architecture is most often the best technology path for modern digital commerce.
Truth or Dare: What Might Lie Ahead For The 2022 Holiday Season
To put some context on the 2022 holiday season, I’m going to suggest some concepts that have been percolating in my mind. Rather than focus strictly on the numbers, I’m going to lean in more on intuition and sentiment. I’ve gathered input from my editorial peers to gain outside perspective and am including retailer marketing and messaging that supports these themes. “It is too risky to do anything crazy. Ecommerce has seen huge change since 2020 and people don’t necessarily want ‘innovation’ in how they shop anymore. They’re tired of it and instead they prefer regularity. If there is innovation, it won’t be something the shopper notices.”
China $131 Billion Singles’ Day Faces Stagnation After Scandals
A year ago, one of China’s most famous internet celebrities sold about $1 billion of products — from shampoo to scarves — in a 14-hour livestream as part of Singles’ Day, the country’s annual e-commerce extravaganza. This year, the 37-year-old super saleswoman known as Viya won’t take part in the world’s biggest shopping event at all after disappearing from the internet since being fined for tax evasion. A slew of other popular livestream stars who have found themselves caught up in President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on celebrity are also likely to be missing this year, dulling the glamor and likely hurting the takings of the marathon event that ends Nov. 11.
How Platform Rules Shape Where People “Live” Online
People see and absorb a lot of election information — and misinformation — on the web. But we are not all getting the same information about politics and policymakers, and certainly not from the same sources. So understanding where people gather and communicate online can be crucial to understanding the political polarization in the United States, especially when some people are migrating to newer platforms that cater to specific political beliefs or content moderation rules.
Amazon Freezes Corporate Hiring in Its Retail Business
Amazon is freezing corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, according to an internal announcement obtained by The New York Times, making it the latest company to pull back amid the economic uncertainty. The announcement, in an email to recruiters, said the company was halting global hiring for all corporate roles, including technology positions, in its stores business, which covers Amazon’s physical and online retail business and its logistics operations. More than 10,000 openings were posted in that division, which accounts for the bulk of Amazon’s sales, as of Monday evening.
The Three Phases of Online Marketplace Internationalization
Marketplaces have become an increasingly important route to market for brands who want to grow their international online sales. In this blog, we share the three key phases to online marketplace internationalization that every consumer brand will go through during its journey to full localization into new markets. Cross-border online sales have grown significantly in recent years, and the global e-commerce market is forecast to surpass $6 trillion USD by 2024. However, launching in new markets is a complex process which requires expert knowledge and a willingness to invest to reach scale.
The Future of Ecommerce Demands a Better Understanding of Online Consumer Journeys
Global ecommerce rose from 15% of total retail sales in 2019 to 21% in 2021. It now sits at an estimated 22% of all sales, according to a 2022 Morgan Stanley global ecommerce forecast report, which notes that “Over the long term, the ecommerce market has plenty of room to grow and could increase from $3.3 trillion today to $5.4 trillion in 2026.” Yet despite that rosy forecast, some brand marketers are asking themselves if the immense growth over the last couple of years was only due to a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic.
.
To subscribe to the Ecommerce & Marketplaces Newsletter, please complete the subscription form on this page (either to the right or below this article, depending on device). If you have any suggested content for this newsletter or would like to discuss evolving your organization’s digital commerce, please write to us at info@mcfadyen.com.
