Category: eCommerce

Neopost Shipping will be exhibiting at this year’s expo. The article below originally appeared on the Neopost website.

In today’s world, traffic is faster, food delivery is held to incredibly quick standards and when we order something online – we expect it at our door within two days.

Many companies are struggling to keep up, and their customer service is lacking when they fall short. Indications are that accelerated demands will become normalized. In fact, a recent Logistics Viewpoints report shows that 50 percent of millennials still desire even quicker deliveries.

According to the “State of Shipping in Commerce” report from Temando, many retailers are intent on expanding shipping and delivery options to keep up with how Amazon has revolutionized fulfillment, but the shoppers they are looking to satisfy are expecting more — and sooner.

“We’re noticing a huge push and pressure on the fulfillment side to get orders turned around on a much faster scale and pace than a lot of technology is capable of doing today,” says Michael Armanious, vice president of sales and marketing at Datex Corporation, a third-party logistics (3PL) management and warehouse solutions provider. “What normally would have taken less than an hour, all of the sudden needs to go out within minutes, which poses challenges in terms of planning.”

The truth is that customers want a window of delivery within a few hours, a “hyperlocal” last-mile initiative that companies are finding difficult to deploy. “By the time the order comes in, it has to be processed and ready to go for us to meet that very narrow window,” adds Armanious.

Last mile delivery is defined as ‘the movement of goods from a transportation hub to the final delivery destination’ – typically a personal residence – and is becoming more important than ever due to the surge of online ordering. The focus of last mile logistics is to deliver items to the end user when they expect it – which is as fast as possible. Last mile logistics has become an important area of interest for retailers because of the growing demand for fully integrated omnichannel retailing.

Evolving omnichannel needs have made retailers evaluate their current transportation network capabilities and adjust accordingly.

This year more than 40 percent of all e-commerce purchases will be made on Amazon – according to an eMarketer estimate. They have set the standard for fast shipping with their Amazon Prime subscribers and continue to rank high in customer service satisfaction. The online behemoth announced recently a new Amazon Delivery Service Partner program, which is designed to let entrepreneurs run with their own local delivery networks of up to 40 vans, all proudly displaying the Prime logo.

Amazon currently has 75 stations in the US where Amazon.com packages are sent to and picked up by drivers. Algorithms determine which packages are sent there and which are sent to other delivery partners like FedEx and UPS.

“This is all about scaling cost effectively,” said Dave Clark, senior vice president of Amazon Worldwide Operations. He says that the program is “much more about customer experience and meeting overall growth. We think this is going to be a cost-effective way to do that.”

This program brings more of the costs and customer service under the control of Amazon, and the smaller entrepreneurs get to operate under the giant company’s name. Amazon said that the program is aimed to enable hundreds of small businesses to get started and will hire tens of thousands of new delivery drivers countrywide. Given the current trucker shortage and carrier strikes in the US, transportation costs are on the rise for many businesses, and this solution helps to lower them.

Not only are final mile logistics expensive when it comes to assets and providers, but a poor home delivery experience can also have a negative impact on a brand’s reputation. In many cases, the last mile delivery is the first “personal contact” between the consumer and the product. Was the packaging damaged? Was the delivery driver rude? Did he deliver within the window of time I asked for? Many different situations can turn an otherwise positive perception into a negative. Almost 100% of shoppers also say they would like delivery date estimates, yet more than half of retailers currently don’t offer this feature.

Rightly so, the focus placed on last mile delivery is important because, in many cases, this could be your key differentiator. Organizations like Amazon Prime, Amazon Now, and Wayfair have set precedent. Consumers can choose to shop anywhere they want and easily find product alternatives from other retailers – which is why it is so important to provide exceptional service and gain market share while building brand loyalty.

So what do companies need to think about when creating a successful last mile delivery model?

One, think beyond geography. Hyperlocal doesn’t only mean coverage of one specific region. The most successful hyperlocal strategies have the capability to scale. A strategy that focuses on a single “locality” will be difficult to scale in other areas. Being able to identify a widespread but local need and having a model that adapts to each new market will be crucial.

Two, identify an abundance of locations to use as “fulfillment centers.” For instance, distribution centers (DC’s) aren’t the only sites you can utilize to ship orders out of. In fact, if you only use DC’s, you’re already behind. Step up your omnichannel strategy and use your suppliers/manufacturers to drop ship, utilize third party logistics companies for additional help and definitely bring your stores into the mix. Did you know that Kohl’s reduced delivery time by ½ day on each delivery by employing their stores as fulfillment centers? (Forrester, 2017)

Three, think about using a variety of carriers, and don’t discount the smaller ones. Together, local, regional and national carriers create a perfect mix of delivery options and capabilities. In fact, smaller local carriers account for almost 60% of the U.S. trucking industry and can typically transport shipments from 80-100 miles within a specified zone. They are great for parcel last mile delivery as they are able to provide personalized, caring service for clients. Regional carriers are great for shippers with multiple distribution centers and a high concentration of customers within a geographical market. They also typically have wider time schedules for pick-up and delivery and often provide next-day deliveries.

Four, don’t just focus on what your competitors are doing, unless you can do it better. It may be easy to replicate a competitor’s strategy, but it’s not always a model that will work for you as well. Each company and each company’s customer base is different. Find a distinguishing angle of your own, because people love niche. Focus on doing what you’re able to do, and do it well.

Five, learn how to say ‘no’. It’s easy to think that you can do this, and this and this too, but you will never be able to please everyone all at once, even with a last mile delivery plan that you think is perfect. Stick to your strategy and tweak it only when necessary.

The opportunities lying ahead are huge. Logistics providers need to position themselves for the upcoming radical change and readjust their existing networks accordingly. The differentiator in this field will be technology. It will be the leading driver as to what companies can do for their customers. Updated technology will manage workflows, direct the customer experience and provides visibility to all parties.

The end consumer will see the difference in the form of a package on their front step, days, even hours, after ordering. You’ll see the difference in the form of increased speed, efficiency and revenue.

Teledata will be exhibiting at this year’s eCommerce Show North.  The article below originally appeared on their website and was written by James Burns.

Many hosting providers offer what they describe as eCommerce hosting or eCommerce-optimised hosting. However, these solutions can be built on very different technologies and offer very different levels of performance and reliability.

Examples include shared server hosting and VPS hosting at the lower end, while more high-end providers will sell dedicated servers as an eCommerce hosting solution.

However, in many cases the limitations of these traditional hosting options can hinder the performance of an online store – a significant disadvantage in the ultra-competitive world of online retail.

For instance, in January 2018 Google formally announced their “Speed Update” which will take into account mobile device page speed as another factor in how websites are ranked in the search results. This update will be rolled out in July 2018 and is designed to weed out the slowest sites.

And while your website may not be affected greatly, it’s now more important than ever that your website performs at its best, especially for mobile. Not only could poor performance affect you negatively in the rankings but it could also prevent visitors from getting to your website in the first place, and upset brand reputation for your eCommerce business. According to research done by Google in 2017, the average loading speed for a landing page on a mobile is 22 seconds – however, it was also revealed that 53% people will leave a mobile site if the page takes more than three seconds to load.

Another study showed that a delay in page loading time or poor website performance could contribute to a 7% reduction in conversion rates – meaning every delay would cost your online business.

For our part, we think the advantages of cloud hosting make it a platform that’s well worth considering – whether you’re making your first move into the world of online trading, or you’re looking to overhaul your current eCommerce hosting arrangements. Read on to learn why.

Cloud offers on-demand scalability

One of the causes of poor performance is that a server is overloaded. There are two possible solutions that could help solve this issue:

Invest in a high-spec dedicated server – Some retailers still choose to invest in high-spec dedicated servers on the expectation that this will give them enough resource to meet demands at their highest. However, this “over-spec” strategy is not very cost-effective – you’re playing for resources that may well remain unused for the majority of the hardware’s lifespan. Nor is it particularly flexible in terms of future growth – if your store takes off in a dramatic way, you’re still going to be facing a time-consuming migration (or expensive load-balancing act).

Invest in an agile cloud server – The cloud on the other hand provides increased agility, allowing retailers to provision more server resources at peak times (such as during high-traffic events like Black Friday), and then scale down again when demand returns to normal levels. This unique advantage of cloud hosting allows you to more closely align your monthly costs with your resources usage – much more cost effective in the long-run, especially for a small-to-medium sized eCommerce business.

Speed and consistent performance

In comparison to shared server and VPS hosting, the cloud option wins hands down. When hosted on a cloud platform, your store will be able to draw all the resources it needs from a large reserve of memory, processing power and storage. Gone are the performance limitations of a single machine, with its hard-limits on resources – all of which were shared by other hosting customers, competing for their share of the hardware.

Dedicated servers on the other hand are sometimes considered to offer more consistent performance than cloud, but this isn’t really noticeable in practice and the scalability of cloud makes it much easier to fine-tune performance anyway. For instance, if a lack of CPU or memory hinders your dedicated server’s performance, you can upgrade or replace the hardware, but this comes at a cost, both in terms of purchase price and downtime during implementation. With a cloud server, however, adding or removing resources is easier and won’t incur the significant, permanent costs associated with a hardware upgrade.

Resilience

A less obvious but equally important consideration for an ecommerce business is that most cloud architectures are inherently more resilient than other forms of hosting.

For example, many cloud server hosting providers have some degree of redundancy built into their platforms – helping prevent downtime due to hardware failures.

Compared to relying on a single server, a cloud platform will enlist resources from any number of physical servers, where, if one fails, it will simply restart on another host, causing as little disruption as possible. For any business, this level of redundancy is important, but the 24/7 nature of an eCommerce website – where an outage can result in lost sales and revenue – makes automated fail-over a key advantage.

Teledata will be exhibiting at this year’s eCommerce Show North.  The article below originally appeared on their website and was written by James Burns.

Most businesses face an impact to their top or bottom line when their websites go down.

Few, however, are more directly affected by downtime than online retailers, where it causes revenue to grind to a halt and customers to take their business to competing websites.

Here, we take a look at how the costs of eCommerce downtime break down, as well as some of the steps online retailers and their partner agencies can take to combat unplanned outages.

The direct cost of eCommerce downtime

A number of studies have attempted to put a concrete figure on the cost of downtime, both in eCommerce and elsewhere. One of the best-known benchmarks is from the Ponemon Institute, which in 2016 showed the average cost of an outage across all sectors to be around $740,000 (£536,000). In eCommerce, the figure was higher still at $758,000.

For an ecommerce business, perhaps the most obvious starting point for counting the cost of downtime is to look at the direct impact on your revenue for a given period. How much would you lose in straight sales if your site was unavailable for one, two, three hours – maybe even an afternoon? For some of you reading this, the figure will run into the thousands of pounds.

Of course, even at this basic level, the cost of an hour’s disruption will vary. Perhaps the most diligent (and frightening!) exercise here is to look at the cost of downtime to you during peak online shopping hours/seasons and weight it accordingly – particularly if you rely on such key periods for a healthy bottom line.

Once you have a basic hourly figure, it’s possible to get an idea of risk exposure with your current eCommerce hosting provider by looking at their uptime SLA (this calculator may help you to get a clearer picture). However, remember that SLAs can be missed, and that downtime or sluggish store performance can also be caused by other factors such as heavy server load – a common problem for online stores at peak times, when their earning potential is highest.

Indirect costs – lost productivity, recovery and more

An ecommerce business can also incur a wide range of indirect costs from a serious downtime incident. Consider the following, for example:

Lost productivity: For as long as the incident lasts, some staff may be unable to do their jobs and others may have to focus on firefighting (such as answering calls from concerned customers) and other low-value work. If your business is a digital agency that builds and runs eCommerce websites for its own clients, this can be an even more significant cost factor as you pour resources into smoothing things over with your customer base.

Cost of recovery: Downtime can be caused by many different factors, and not all of them are as simple to recover from as others. In some cases, you may need to tap into expert resource to restore from backups, solve complex software problems and so on.

Reputational damage: In the ultra-competitive world of eCommerce, there’s no reason for inconvenienced customers not to flock to other websites and stay there – costing you both in terms of new and repeat business.

Damage to SEO: It’s easy to overlook, but downtime can also impact your search performance and therefore prevent shoppers from getting to your website for a time even after the incident has been resolved.

3 tips to combat eCommerce downtime

So what can an eCommerce business do to protect itself against the potential cost and reputational damage of an outage?

Thankfully, there are a few different steps you can take to ensure your website (or, in the digital agency scenario, your clients’ websites) isn’t more exposed to the risk of downtime than it needs to be. Here are three of our top tips:

Look at your hosting platform. Is it a good fit for your website in terms of expected traffic numbers (both now and in the future), hardware redundancy and backup provision? The quick and easy scalability of a cloud platform, for example, lends itself well to eCommerce businesses that experience seasonal demand or forecast rapid growth. We recommend you familiarise yourself on the differences between shared, VPS, cloud server hosting and dedicated server hosting in particular.

What level of uptime can your hosting provider realistically deliver? What’s their SLA – and, more importantly, is it backed up by high-quality infrastructure? (Any provider can say they offer a particular number of nines in their SLA, but only the best ones will be able to talk confidently about the technical controls they use to back this up.)

Can you rely on your hosting provider for fast and high-quality support to solve the problem? It may not be the first thing you think of when sourcing a hosting platform, but no provider is immune to downtime – so it makes sense to look for one that can show you glowing references from happy customers to demonstrate their value at a time of crisis. The ultimate “try before you buy” test? Give your prospective provider’s support team a call and see how easily you can get through to someone that can help. If or when disruption occurs, you need the process of getting authoritative help to be as simple and fast as possible.

This week, our eCommerce Matters series shares the latest tips and insights from our exhibition partners including XSellco, Cheetah Digital, Klarna and Pure Clarity. XSellco chat to our expo director, Martyn Collins about the importance of having an eCommerce expo in the North, Cheetah Digital aim to help you prepare for your Christmas marketing, Klarna share 5 tips for making your website checkout mobile friendly and Pure Clarity explain eCommerce personalisation.

XSellco
eCommerce Show North is expected to attract 4,000 attendees with more than 120 exhibitors. This week, expo director, Martyn Collins explained to XSellco why it’s high time England’s North-West had it’s own eCommerce expo. You can find the full interview, here.

Cheetah Digital
The end of summer for marketers means that the countdown for the busy holiday season is on. Cheetah Digital have shared 9 Ways to help you prepare for success and increase sales too. You can find out more, here.

Klarna
A growing amount of shoppers are beginning to purchase with their smartphone or tablet. However, many businesses still lack a mobile friendly website and checkout, failing to address new customer expectations of a smooth buying experience. Klarna have shared 5 tips to make your website checkout more mobile friendly. You can read more, here.

Pure Clarity
What is eCommerce personalisation? Pure Clarity explain the benefits of segmenting customers into multiple profiles, in order to show real-time personalised recommendations and relevant products. You can learn more, here.