Some observations from Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Trends Presentation

eCommerce is NOW ~13% of Retail Sales, at the current rate of growth, it will pass 50% sometime in the next decade … Is large footprint brick & mortar the core of your 10 year strategy, may you want to rethink that?

More interesting data, facts and key points on eCommerce as the Value Chain is pretty seamless now with best of breed easy to integrate components:

Payment — POS, Invoices, Payroll etc … plenty of examples

Online Store — e.g. Shopify, Squarespace, Amazon Store, Vertical Markets like Etsy etc …

Online Payment — e.g. Stripe …

Fraud Prevention — e.g. Signifyd …

Purchase Financing — e.g. Affirm … so your customer can pay monthly or as a subscription (business model changes)

Customer Support — real-time … e.g. Intercom (the ex-pat in me loves seeing them in there)

Finding Customers (hold on is that not my job, there is a product that does that now — hmmm) — e.g. Criteo … there are 1000s of ways to go about this, still lots of expansion using FB for consumers (all the hype & news aside — you can target by multiple criteria and good content still wins out) or LinkedIn (under-utilized by B2B marketers — high quality LTV customers, maybe not volume you want yet, but quality)

Delivering Product — USPS (thanks to Amazon’s help on last mile :), UPS, Fedex …

And all the above are low cost of entry and per transaction cost models … It’s never been easier to start a store, assuming you have a great product, can keep the marketing simple, get customers/testimonials, and it works, to disrupt any market … Though guess what it comes back too the best experiences for customers and prospects, and CX (customer experience) is just really 3 things: your products, your content and your people (assuming we still need them)

A little lesson (from me, a pet peeve). For eCom: product search as many or more people are searching on Amazon as on Search Engines (why do we say plural — it’s really just Google, sorry Yahoo & AOL). And there are really 2 types of online marketing drivers:

Demand Fulfillment i.e. people know what they want and ‘search’ for it. And please, search is way more than SEO it’s all your content & messaging (sorry to all the SEO keyword experts out there)

Demand Generation i.e. people need to discover they need your product/service, often they don’t know a product exists or they used to buy something different. Here you have to create the demand, bottom up and often a customer at a time (yep, that’s how most successful startups work, successful). And to create demand — online discovery often (mostly) happens on platforms like FB and Instagram (my own fav for new things, plus the content is far more happier, though for the day that is in it — I found out first about Anthony Bourdain’s death on IG, so if your audience is into cooking and travel guess where they spend hours daily and first go when they wake up)