Developing a global eCommerce strategy Global eCommerce is evolving rapidly with individuals and businesses around the globe migrating online. Today’s customers want more and are spending more and business is responding to this demand.

Global eCommerce is evolving rapidly with individuals and businesses around the globe migrating online. Today’s customers want more and are spending more and business is responding to this demand.

Growth has been driven by a range of factors; more consumers are tech-savvy, mobile commerce has grown, logistics capabilities have diversified, emerging international markets are rising in importance, store-based retailers are getting more confident and product and brand disruption is becoming more commonplace with brands like Uber, Birchbox, Think Geek and Instacart inventing new categories.

This growth is not just taking place in start-ups and retailers. The boundaries are blurring between B2C and B2B and between retailers and manufacturers. A staggering 43% of buyers would be put off buying a manufacturer’s product through another channel if they could not buy it direct through their site. This demand has driven manufacturers such as ASICS, Crocs and Black & Decker to go direct, establishing their own online operations and gradually rolling out a global presence to grow margins and brand value.

B2B commerce is growing at a faster rate than B2C with the global B2B commerce industry set to grow to $6.7 Trillion by 2020, twice the size of B2C (Ali Baba, 2015). 89% of B2B buyers expect the online buying experience to be just as compelling and easy as it is for consumers (Hybris, 2015) and that is no mean feat when you consider the complexity of many business transactions, with factors like quoting, procurement, ordering management and international payment methods coming into play.

Going globalWhilst global standards have emerged, one size does not fit all, particularly given the big variances between user groups and market maturity levels.

According to Forrester, early-stage markets behave differently from established markets, testing the water with basics such as online travel purchases and banking before moving to comparable goods such as electronics, technology and music, and finally graduating onto more subjective purchases such as apparel, grocery and beauty. As confidence grows, so too does appetite and demand, across both functional and more emotional purchases.

Gone are the days when most brands offered just one or two international sites. Today, a global eCommerce footprint is the end goal. To reach that goal, companies are reviewing opportunities around the globe and balancing the size of each market with factors such as ease of entry, market maturity and competitive landscape.

So how should businesses develop a global eCommerce strategy?

Having supported global manufacturers such as Sportswear giant ASICS in going direct to the consumer, Amaze believe there are five critical steps to establishing and operating a successful global ecommerce strategy.

1. Understand customer, market and opportunityEvery high-growth, high-profit consumer brand in the last decade was constructed with consumer convenience in mind. Brands like Amazon, eBay, Uber and Netflix have changed behaviour and raised the bar for every online operator. All have one thing in common, a

relentless focus on differentiated, personalised service that is equally applicable across multiple markets.

To develop a powerful value proposition, that enables a business to gain traction in several markets, brands must first understand the market maturity levels, nuances between markets and the precedent for eCommerce in each locale. For instance: are customers seeking service, fulfilment and delivery innovation? Are apps the only way forward? Is product innovation important or does it simply boil down to price? Finally, are intermediaries and aggregators a key entry point and if so how should these be managed?

With this insight to hand it is easier to plan a solution design and start to consider your roadmap. Whilst there is truth to the saying “get trading then get efficient”, to avoid descending into development hell and spiralling costs businesses need to select a flexible platform that supports continuous improvement without costing the earth.

To build an eCommerce brand it is critical that your value proposition is both singular and consistent across markets. Offering nuanced services and emphasising these to different customer segments across markets is critical, as these need to link back to a recognisable proposition the customer can sympathise with. For instance, I have used Uber in four countries; it works the same despite offering a slightly different service. It is one brand.

To support ASICS in developing this proposition Amaze took the bold step of developing the proposition and creative blueprint for the project with the most mature market from a brand and ecommerce perspective rather than Head Office in Japan. The key was to develop a compelling ecommerce proposition that didn’t emulate the competition and played on the expert brand ‘running expert’ positioning in a way that retailers could not. It was clear that ASICS needed to develop a platform that artfully combined content, commerce and a personalised approach to training to be respected in the running community.

With our proposition and creative blueprint to hand we were able to plan solution design and start to consider the content that would be required alongside the standard ecommerce solution elements.

By understanding regional nuances and the growth trajectory in each market you are able to start assessing your global opportunity and from this point, deciding where and how to launch.

2. Define your solutionArmed with a clear view of the customer need and opportunity you must determine the shape of the solution. eCommerce solution design is a multi-faceted process that takes into account many factors; content, product, price, inventory, order management, payment, logistics and customer service to name but a few.

Working these factors through in a multi-disciplinary working group, under the stewardship of a business analyst, is critical to making decisions quickly and ensuring all the moving parts are considered. As part of this process, it is important to consider the regional applicability of each aspect of the solution, particularly for features such as payments.

Adopting local payment methods will dramatically improve your chances of success in more markets. Although cards are the most common payment option in the UK and the USA, this is not the case everywhere. Germany and Japan favour post-purchase invoicing and Ali Pay is the preferred option in China, with “traditional” Visa, MasterCard and Amex players largely absent. More broadly with apps such as Grabble using Apple Pay for eCommerce transactions we can expect payment diversity to grow further across all categories.

Identifying global businesses with innovative and flexible feature sets who are able to provide global support is critical. The biggest decision a business needs to make and live with, is which core eCommerce platform should we invest in?

Whilst there is truth to the saying ‘get trading then get efficient’, to avoid spiralling costs businesses need to select a platform that supports continuous improvement quickly and cost effectively as new products need to be brought to market and optimised.

In the case of a greenfield eCommerce project such as ASICS all these decisions needed to be made at one point in time with the right set of suppliers also needing to be selected and procured. Whilst the core platform selected, hybris, was a global licence, due to market variances we chose different payment and fulfilment solutions to support the variances in business set-up and customer preference between Europe, the US and Japan.

How you operate the new platform and solution is also just as important as the features you offer the customer.

With a high-level technology model in place it is key to determine how, operationally, the solution will be managed from a people and process perspective. The first step is to map your current ‘as is’ processes in order to assess the size of the change and allow you to develop a realistic plan.

This involves asking several key questions. For instance:

• Which processes already exist but simply need to be adapted?

• Where are completely new processes required?

• Is there a skills gap that needs to be closed?

• How should the existing content management effort be brought together with product management to ensure the business delivers an integrated customer experience?

• Are you data ready from the point of view of both customer and product data, and does your data capture and processing practices meet legal requirements in all target markets?

To meet this challenge for ASICS, Amaze developed a blueprint for the eCommerce organisation they believed they would need to build globally. In some instances this required new hires, for example, in the domain of customer service, and in others it meant training, for example, equipping the existing web analytics team with finely tuned eCommerce and AB testing skills. As their eCommerce maturity has grown the team has naturally expanded and eCommerce responsibility now extends into sales, marketing and the finance organisation.

3. Build the business case Your business case should seek to understand and scale the long-term costs and opportunity. Whilst you will not go to market will a full feature set, your business case should factor in the effort and investment required to grow to a more complete solution and feature, set over a two to five year period.

This means going beyond simply factoring in the software, build and business, as usual operations, and instead focusing on a wider set of activities and ownership costs.

These include, the cost of launch communications, benchmarking and research (particularly in relation to new customer groups and new locales), analytics and testing to support growth, on-going assessment of ways of working and, critically, the addition of new features and functionality in support of customers such as ways to shop, pay and personalise. These elements of the cost base should not be viewed as an overhead; they are essential to competition and growth and must be sized as revenue opportunities.

Understanding and sizing the benefits is paramount to developing a realistic business case that will not only ensure you get the approval you need but will guide you in prioritising activity and evaluating performance going forward.

Developing a series of benchmarks is key to developing a realistic benefits model. These should be based on your existing platform and the market and must take into account market maturity levels and competitors.

As a new to market proposition, ASICS, had to develop a complete five-year P&L and business case for HQ approval. This factored in licensing costs across all software investments, consultancy costs, media and acquisition investment required to take market share and the head count required to operate the sites. Core platform licensing was based on a payment scenario that enabled us to gradually up weight investment as markets went live.

From an acquisition point of view with no eCommerce baseline, we used our current traffic levels with market benchmarks on manufacturer conversion to project what the first five years could look like. Pricing assumptions against market were factored in alongside SEO value on the basis of the content investment, a rise in paid search performance and ROI and finally the value of ASICS’ existing database of runners.

4. Go to market With a high level solution (underpinned by people and process) and a well thought-through business case in mind you are already half-way to determining which features will make it into your MVP launch solution.

A successful brand creates a perception that there is no product on the market quite like yours. Whilst the lowest hanging fruit should drive your MVP solution from a revenue, people

and process perspective you should set a goal to outcompete your closest peers on at least one dimension and to clearly communicate that fact. Define what, in category, would genuinely make life easier for the customer and deliver on at least one aspect of this from day one.

For ASICS this was quite simply about product choice. We needed to go to market with a site that was better than peers at helping serious runners find the shoe they needed on the basis of experience, ability and goal. To this end initial efforts focus on product listing and detail pages, facets and filters and AB testing within this product selection funnel.

5. Optimise and enhance your proposition and platform Once live, in line with your business case you now need to grow your efficiency and effectiveness and deliver on your value proposition.

Part of this focus will naturally be tactical – getting products live, merchandising, testing and optimisation to improve funnel efficency – but it is also critical to develop a longer-term roadmap that takes a genuinely external view of your business.

This roadmap should shape how you develop new revenue streams, features and partnerships to continue to differentiate your offer and must spell out how you will scale-up from a people and process perspective to do so.

Optimisation efforts for ASICS were relentlessly focused on helping the manufacturer compete on a much more even keel with more mature sportswear ecommerce operators whilst also being able to operate a level of market leading elements across product selection, checkout and expert content. AB testing was key to the process and where possible paved the way for more formal changes to be made through planned code releases.

To take staff on this journey, presentations and internal communication material were put together and inter-market meetings held to discuss and prioritise activity. Change was delivered through quarterly packages with evaluation for the previous quarter taking place simultaneously. The result? In years one and two ASICS delivered a 27% increase in conversion, a 10% increase in transactions and an 11% increase in revenue.

Adaptability to change is at the heart of a successful global eCommerce platform. Having a flexible strategy in place to deliver this change should be the number one priority for businesses with global aspirations.

Jasper Bell is Digital & Commerce Consultant & Strategist at Amaze – a leading full service digital marketing, technology and commerce agency.

For more information, visit: www.Amaze.com.

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