Customer support was busier in 2021: ticket volumes increased for all channels compared to the year before. Consumers also have higher expectations of customer service.

Customer’s questions on WhatsApp even more than tripled compared to 2020. Requests via phone calls and social media increased around 20 percent according to research by Zendesk. More than 80 percent of customers expect to continue contacting customer care at this rate, while 10 percent expects to contact support even more, Salesforce reports. These are just a few conclusions from Salesupply’s latest Ecommerce Customer Care Guide.

New increased expectations

In addition to higher ticket volumes, online retailers face some unique challenges. Firstly, shoppers have higher expectations: 55 percent of consumers say they expect more from customer service compared to 2020. For example, a majority wants their issue to be resolved during the first contact.

Customer support has also become more digital. For the first time in 2021, more than half of British customer service experiences were digital, according to The Institute of Customer Service. Contact took place, for example, via e-mail, chat and social media. These channels can still be improved though: of all online channels, chatbots scored the lowest in customer satisfaction.

Service only in their own language

Besides, cross-border ecommerce is on the rise. The market is expected to reach over 4 trillion euros by 2030, according to Fatpos Global. That is a sixfold increase compared to 2020. Although consumers increasingly shop cross-border, they prefer service in their native language.

CSA Research shows that 40 percent of consumers will never buy from a website in a different language. If customer support does serve in their mother language, 3 in 4 shoppers say they are more likely to buy from that website again.

Self-service options appreciated

Another post-pandemic expectation from customers is self-service. More than 40 percent of customers are choosing digital self-service options, a survey by Shep Hyken found, like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), video tutorials and chatbots. Do-it-yourself options such as knowledge bases and community forums are thus gaining popularity.

One of the consequences of Russia’s “military operation” in Ukraine is the loss of technical human resources.  This will definitely impact software innovation and supply chain, analytics say.

Ukraine called itself Eastern Europe’s Silicon Valley with more than 300,000 technology professionals.

Before the end of February the country was a top software developer community and provided services for customers in European and other countries.

Gartner estimates more than one million IT professionals work in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, with one-quarter (250,000) working for consulting or outsourcing firms. The loss is 10-15% of European developer workforce. The crisis is already clear. It made evident how many global companies relied on Ukraine as one of their development bases.

More than three million people have already fled Ukraine and millions more internally displaced.

Lithuania has launched simplified processes for Ukrainian refugees to work in the country.

Belarus was also a significant player in the developer sourcing ecosystem. But it played in another part of the market and cannot so far compete with that current scale and level of software developing services.

Besides, there are economic sanctions imposed on Belarus. They are less severe, but still Western companies are exiting Belarus as their development hub.

Amazon.com Inc. has recently acquired e-commerce technology startup Veeqo Ltd and confirmed it in its statement. It happened last November but the company announced the acquisition several days ago.

Quoting Veeqo’s website, it is the inventory and fulfilment platform built by an ecommerce seller, for ecommerce sellers, made in Swansea, Wales. It provides a cloud service that helps online retailers manage their business operations.

The startup’s service mainly targets retailers that sell their merchandise through not one but multiple online platforms, such as Amazon and Shopify  and helps avoid a great deal of duplicate work.

With Veeqo’s cloud service retailers can centrally perform tasks such as inventory management across all the online channels through which they sell their merchandise. It reduces manual work for a retailer’s employees and thereby increases operational efficiency.

Retailers can track inventory levels, determine when stock is running low and order new merchandise from suppliers. If a retailer has a presence in multiple markets, it can use Veeqo to coordinate what merchandise shipment should be routed to which location.

Veeqo also provides features to manage customer orders, returns and refunds. The service has a built-in analytics tool to predict future customer demand and help retailers ensure that they have a sufficient amount of merchandise in stock.

A few months ago, Amazon said that about 2 million third-party sellers offer their products on its e-commerce marketplace. With Veeqo’s service, the company can help simplify operations for third-party sellers that offer their products not only on its marketplace but also on other platforms such as Shopify.

Third-party sellers are central in Amazon’s e-commerce strategy. They accounted for about 60% of Amazon’s online sales last year. Small and midsized businesses in the U.S. sold more than 3.8 billion products through the company’s e-commerce marketplace during the 12 months ended Aug. 31, up from 3.4 billion the prior year.

Amazon could also use Veeqo’s features to manage sales across multiple e-commerce platforms to advance its Multi-Channel Fulfillment program. That program allows retailers to use Amazon’s logistics network to ship products they sell through other e-commerce platforms.

Amazon’s representatives added in the official statement that the company “plans to continue investing in new features and improvements to help Veeqo serve sellers globally from its home in Wales, facilitate growth for sellers’ multi-channel businesses, and enhance the experience of their customers”.

As siliconangle.com reminds, Veeqo is the second e-commerce technology startup that Amazon has acquired in so many years. Early last year, the company acquired Selz, a startup with a platform that helps online retailers with tasks such as website development and managing ad campaigns.

Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services Inc., also offers multiple solutions for retailers. Among those solutions is the Amazon Personalize service that AWS launched in 2019. The service uses machine learning to help companies with tasks such as generating shopping recommendations.

AWS has a long list of major retailers among its customers, including Best Buy Co. Inc. and J Sainsbury plc, the second-largest supermarket chain in the U.K. Best Buy recently named AWS as its preferred cloud provider as part of an initiative to upgrade its technology capabilities.

Indonesia flies under the digital radar despite its sizeable ecommerce market. The country’s population is 278.3 million, the fourth largest globally. With over 10 million residents, Jakarta, the capital, is the biggest city in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Indonesia consists of over 17,000 islands, creating both ecommerce opportunities and a logistics challenge. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that ecommerce consumers in small towns and remote islands save 15 to 25% by shopping online because there are few brick-and-mortar stores and prices are high.

Demographics

Eighty-seven percent of Indonesians are Muslim, the largest population worldwide. Twenty percent of the country is middle-class.

According to practicalecommerce.com, Indonesians are avid social media users, and the country is a mobile-first market with many residents never owning a computer. A McKinsey survey shows that  almost 80% of internet traffic goes through mobile connections. The population’s median age is 30 years, and young consumers are digitally sophisticated. The 30- to 39-year-old group accounts for 47% of ecommerce spending.

Ecommerce Statistics

A report from the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies shows that about 138 million Indonesians shop online — roughly one-half of the population. The ecommerce sector accounts for 72% of the total value of the digital economy. Only a quarter of ecommerce purchases are cross-border, but researchers expect the market for goods from other countries to expand.

Indonesia is the ninth largest ecommerce market, with projected 2022 sales of USD $59 billion, according to Statista. Redseer, a consulting company, reported that the number of online shoppers in Indonesia grew from 75 million pre-Covid to 85 million during the pandemic.

Revenue. Fashion comprises 31% of Indonesia’s ecommerce revenue. Electronics and media is second at 23%, followed by food and personal care at 16%, toys and hobbies at 16%, and furniture and appliances at 14%.

The most significant ecommerce player in Indonesia is retailer JD.id, with 2021 revenue of $2.3 billion. Next is Shopee.co.id, a marketplace, with revenue of $390 million. Orami.co.id, a “parenting platform” combining commerce and content, posted 2021 revenue of $295 million.

Payments. Sixty-six percent of transactions by volume in Indonesia is cash. The most popular digital method in 2020 was preloading cash value onto an e-payment application via a website or mobile wallet — accounting for almost 30% of all total payments. GoPay ranked first among those applications, followed by two domestic providers: OVO and ShopeePay.

Top 5 Marketplaces

The top visited Indonesian marketplaces, according to ecommerceDB, a division of Statista, are as follows.

Tokopedia. Founded in 2009, Tokopedia is a B2C and C2C marketplace. It garnered 135 million monthly visits in the first quarter of 2021. Electronics is the most popular product category, followed by fashion and groceries.

Shopee. The aforementioned Shopee, founded in Singapore in 2015, earns most of its revenue in Indonesia. It is the second-largest marketplace there in terms of traffic, with 127 million visits per month. Shopee’s most popular categories are beauty, household appliances, and fashion.

Bukalapak, founded in Indonesia in 2010, is another C2C and B2C marketplace with 34 million visitors per month in the first quarter of 2021. It also serves mom-and-pop shops known as warungs located in more remote areas. Bukalapak now has about 6 million merchants selling a wide variety of products. In 2021 Bukalapak went public in an IPO that raised $1.5 billion.

Lazada, owned by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, emphasizes low prices. Electronics and fashion are the two most popular product categories. Lazada also offers a logistics and payments infrastructure for its ecommerce sites in various countries in Southeast Asia. In the first quarter of 2021, the site captured 30 million visits per month in Indonesia.

Blibli, owned by Djarum Group, a multi-brand manufacturer, received more than 19 million monthly visits in the first quarter of 2021. It sells electronics, apparel, food, and kitchen appliances. Blibli integrates omnichannel B2B and B2C and offers several payment and delivery options.

Challenges

Although it has seen significant growth, ecommerce in Indonesia faces challenges. For instance, the country lags behind its neighbors in logistics and service. A high percentage of deliveries are on motorcycles. Indonesia also lacks an educated, digitally sophisticated workforce. Just 13% of Indonesians have a university education.

Moreover, only 49% of Indonesians use banking services.

Unlike other countries, C2C marketplaces play a prominent ecommerce role, which contributes to fraud and uneven service quality.

The contract logistics company DHL chose ReverseLogix to deal with eCommerce returns. ReverseLogix will now be responsible for all the supply chain constraints.

The company provides end-to-end returns management services B2C and B2B. To be more exact, they engage in solutions to connect eCommerce return systems. They allow the companies to streamline requests, logistics, and other processing.

DHL is going to make use of that to fulfill various customers’ needs and please their requirements.

The National Retail Federation informed the high returns in 2021. The rate rose by 78% amounting to over $761 billion. DHL undertook this opportunity to correlate with growth for the company.

Chris Blickhan, the vice president of development, stated that returns have evolved into a critical factor in satisfying today’s e-commerce customers prompting retailers to seek out partners like DHL Supply Chain to help put in place and execute efficient, fast, and cost-effective returns.

Retailers have recorded a huge benefit from the pandemic and the restrictions. The consumers ended up spending most of the money on retailers. For example, the spending for Valentine’s day went up to $23.9 billion.

Customers already planned to celebrate the holiday. Three-quarters of the customers wanted to make up for the missed time. They call it an “important” expenditure due to the pandemic’s current state. This is going to benefit the retailers. The increased revenue acquisition will enhance eCommerce returns.

There will be a spike in per person expenditure. It is going to rise up to $175 per person. It is higher than the last year, which was $164.76.

Manufacturers in Europe have prioritized developing self-service ecommerce but face such challenges as channel conflicts and lack of support from management, a new study finds.

Manufacturers, both foreign and domestic, face the same set of challenges—and priorities—when it comes to B2B digital commerce.

A small survey of 50 European manufacturers from Stockholm-based digital commerce research firm Copperberg and ecommerce firms Intershop and Evident finds that a lack of regional market knowledge (38%) and a lack of support from the organization’s top executives (34%) are the top two challenges standing in the way of developing or expanding a digital commerce strategy.

But the top priority for rolling out or expanding B2B ecommerce is developing digital self-services to increase buying convenience (62%), according to the Copperberg survey.

What is digital self-service?

Digital self-service is a solution or a group of solutions enabling web users or employees to be completely autonomous on a website or intranet.

These tools and information enables them to find the answers to their questions without having to contact customer suport or their HR department. Digital self-service usually affect actions that are quite simple, such as asking for a quote or even managing a contract.

Why is self-service important?

The implementation of one or more self-service solutions becomes relevant when a client service department is facing numerous online requests, to the point where it’s humanly difficult, if not impossible, to manage these.

Beyond this, self-service meets the ever-growing needs of Internet users: autonomy and speed.

Studies are clear on this point: web users first look for a way to find the information on their own before contacting customer service.

A Zendesk study shows that 81% of customers try to take care of their own problem before reaching out to support channels.

If you don’t manage to meet their expectations, you risk suffering the wrath of your clients. With users hyperconnection, a customer lets his entourage and the entire web know that he is not satisfied. This word-of-mouth, or even worse this bad buzz, can have a significant impact on your business and drive away potential prospects.

76% of clients have stopped doing business with an organisation due to its poor client service and 39% have even immediately abandoned their purchase to switch to another supplier.

Benefits of digital self-service

Self-service can take many forms and be adapted to a multitude of sectors and services. Its benefits are numerous:

• Increased customers’ satisfaction

By providing an optimized customer experience to your users, through a solution that effectively answers their questions, available 24/7, you give them autonomy and time savings that will make all the difference. A satisfied client is a loyal one! According to a Salesforce study, more than 88% of clients say that an immediate answer to their issue encourages loyalty.

• Reduction of low added-value incoming contacts

“I’ve lost my confirmation”, “Where’s my parcel?” or “I’ve lost my credit card”, this type of questions with low-added value are recurring ones in all customer services. These routine questions are time-consuming for customer advisors to handle because they are the most recurring ones. Yet at least 80% of these low added-value contacts can be fully automated. By responding automatically to these routine questions, your team members will have more time to devote to contacts with greater added value or to real issues and you will be able to observe a reduction in incoming contacts ranging from 30 to 50%!

• Increase in conversion rate

Self-service solutions are designed to simplify the customer journey. By streamlining access to information and communicating it at the right time you will gain your client/prospect’s trust.

Self-service solutions also offer the possibility to dynamize sensitive processing funnels, such as quotations, and thus promote conversion.

How to sell online and establish long-term relationships with key customers having access to data about their preferences, behaviors, and purchases? How to add a layer of personal touch to the shopping experience that is missing on traditional CRM systems?

Live commerce platform Immerse brings new digital foot traffic as an add-on website sales channel.

It’s a unique platform that connects its clienteling capabilities to retail clients’ CRM software.

The Immerss platform allows businesses to keep track of client purchases. This, in turn, gives in-store associates who might be working from remote locations the ability to identify the most loyal customers as well as their preferences to provide a more targeted service.

Two years ago, Arthur Veytsman, CEO of Immerss, developed a live commerce platform that changed how e-commerce sites serve their customers. It enables online merchants to sell online in real-time, dramatically speeding up a process that until now has mostly been done in person or offline.

Tools like FaceTime, Zoom, and SMS messaging are all connection tools. The software is completely embedded with the client’s back end and platform, which allows to be there when the conversation starts.

How It Started

Once Veytsman had a luncheon meeting with the president of Lucchese, a 138-year-old custom bootmaker based in Texas. The retailer was looking into potentially using live commerce as an option to work with online influencers.

He was dissatisfied with the results of traditional CRM chat features. He saw a gap in how his salespeople performed in the direct-to-consumer store. On the sales floor, he explained, they do well when talking to clients and know how to meet their needs.

The Lucchese website never gave his sales staff the ability to speak to clients in the same manner. The chat channel was just meant to be a customer service arm. What the company needed was a way to connect clients with trained salespeople.

Lucchese’s president signed up with Immerss in July 2019. The new software went live in 2020.

The integrated platform took Lucchese through the pandemic. Post-pandemic retail at the custom-made boot store picked up even further. The company created a digital showroom because the number of inquiries coming through the sales portal was so high.

A panel of products enables the sales associate to see what the customer recently viewed. The salesperson can suggest an item directly in that window back to the client.

Together they can walk it all the way to checkout. It is a very embedded experience during the call.

It is a full clienteling app versus discombobulated ways of connecting to people together. It is all under one platform. In addition, it’s a tool for sales staff to sell worldwide with no limitation. It brings in traffic from the website as an add-on sales channel.

The Immerss platform brings a fully integrated solution connected with the retailer’s back-end software and CRM. The platform works via desktop, mobile devices (both iOS and Android apps), and web browsers.

Immerss is also integrated into the Shopify app. Veytsman’s roadmap is to do similar integrations with other SaaS platforms, e-commerce platforms like Salesforce commerce, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and more.

Shopping on social media platforms is growing at a torrid pace — three times faster than traditional e-commerce platforms — and is on a pace to reach US$1.2 trillion globally by 2025, according to a study released Tuesday by an international professional services firm.

62 percent of this growth will be driven by Gen Z and millennial shoppers, reported Accenture, which defines social commerce as shopping on a social media platform where a person’s entire experience from discovery to final purchase can be performed on the platform.

Influence of Influencers

Social commerce may become mainstream for all shoppers, but right now, it’s primarily attracting younger shoppers. That’s partly because influencers are driving social commerce and younger adults and teens are much more likely to engage with and follow social media influencers.

Social media are often cited as a top channel for product discovery, as they have given rise to influencers as key components to generating awareness as part of a marketing strategy. This can help small businesses or lesser-known brands on the net. 59 percent) of social buyers are more likely to support small and medium-sized businesses through social commerce than when shopping through e-commerce websites.

Consumer Trust Issues

Consumers do cite trust as a critical barrier to purchasing on social media, and the platforms will need to solve for these barriers by improving merchandising capabilities and highlighting payment security.

Concerns voiced deal with proper purchase protection, proper returns, refunds, exchange policies, the authenticity of social sellers.

Trust is one area where traditional e-commerce players currently have an advantage over social commerce players.

Ad Scams

The quality of advertising on some social platforms can also be contributing to consumer skepticism about social commerce.

Too many ads, particularly on Facebook, are scams, that is training people not to buy off of these platforms. While Instagram and Facebook have limited or little trust as entities, social media influencers may be more trustworthy.

Some existing traditional e-commerce activity are likely to shift to social platforms. Social commerce has shown incremental growth over the past few years and is expected to continue to grow in the double-digits as the capabilities mature for end-to-end transactions. They’re already massive in China.

Subscription box services are becoming increasingly popular in the United Kingdom. Driven by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns more and more Brits have signed up for one or more subscription box services.

Food, drink, recipe boxes and male grooming drive the growth in the subscription box market in the United Kingdom. Because of the several lockdowns, many consumers want to have convenient home deliveries of essential items.

The UK Subscription Box Market report by Royal Mail shows that more than a quarter (26 percent) of shoppers in the United Kingdom are currently signed up to a food and drink subscription box service.

These kinds of services showed the highest growth year-on-year in 2020. The markets of food and drink subscription boxes, as well as recipe box subscription services have a combined value of over 1.18 billion euros (up from almost 500 million euros in 2017) with this forecast to grow to over 1.77 billion euros by 2025.

Growth among several types of boxes

According to Royal Mail, more and more businesses are now recognizing the potential of these boxes to serve the daily and essential needs of consumers. And it’s not only food or grocery boxes that grow in demand, there has also been strong growth in personal care and grooming items (such as razors, blades and shaving accessories), hygiene-related items (such as deodorants) and household staples (such as laundry detergent).

The UK subscription box market is set to be worth 2.13 billion euros by 2025.

The authors of the report think that the trend of subscription services will likely continue post-pandemic. “Due to changes in consumers’ shopping behaviors, and the convenience that these subscription plans provide.” Overall, the subscription box market in the United Kingdom is expected to be worth 2.13 billion euros by 2025.

Most subscription box services are cancelled within a year

Earlier this month, research showed that only one in fifty UK shoppers have kept their subscription services for more than a year. The average consumer in the United Kingdom even cancels their subscriptions within 5.3 months.