This Christmas over £24 billion will be spent online on presents and gifts. And while some of these packages will be picked up instore through Click and Collect services, the vast majority will be delivered by the post and couriers. This last leg of the ecommerce customer experience has always been hard for retailers to control.
We’re now well into the holiday shopping season, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us but plenty of shopping days to go before Christmas itself. The trading picture so far this year has been mixed, and for many retailers this time of year is make or break time.
Having recently looked back on customer experience in 2015, what is predicted for the coming year? As always, leading analysts have provided their own thoughts and in this blog I’d like to look at trends highlighted by Forrester and Gartner.Kate Leggett of Forrester outlines 10 areas for focus in 2016, with these being 5 that she has shared through a recent blog...
Thanks to the internet, retail is a global industry, with companies now facing competition from peers around the world. As we’ve discussed before, this means that a focus on the customer is vital – with businesses needing to understand what consumers want and provide them with a tailored experience that meets their exact requirements. At the same time as the internet has...
As we approach the holiday shopping season, retailers are getting ready for their busiest time of the year. So at Eptica we thought it would be a good time to look at how they perform when it comes to the customer experience. The 2015 Eptica Retail Customer Experience Study therefore evaluated 500 U.S. retailers, in 15 sectors, on their ability to provide answers to 10 questions...
The first secure ecommerce transaction took place 20 years ago when a lucky shopper paid $12.48 plus shipping to buy Sting’s album, Ten Summoner’s Tales, from NetMarket. From these small beginnings online sales have grown to hit £93 billion in the UK last year, according to IMRG, and are expected to top £100 billion in 2014.How we shop today is radically different to 1994, ...
When Facebook launched its e-commerce platform, a huge number of high profile retailers opened virtual stores on the social media network. Since then many of these have closed amidst poor customer take-up – for example recent research found that just 2% of French consumers would buy through Facebook. However new retailers are still opening F-commerce stores and niche boutiques are recording ...
The continuing bad news from the UK retail sector, with sales growth slowing and more than one in ten high street shops vacant means retailers need to focus clearly on customer service if they are to successfully compete in a challenging market.Nowhere is this competition more intense than in the fashion sector, with sales of clothing and footwear actually declining in July. However one brig...
It is widely acknowledged that the UK is the largest online market in Europe – hitting £44 billion in 2010, and expected to reach £51 billion this year. However other countries are growing as fast, if not faster, with the entire European population turning to email and web channels. Forty per cent of EU consumers bought goods and services over the Internet in 2010, with sal...