eCom story has always had three subplots — brands, retailers and aggregators. It’s time tech evolved to weave them together into a beautiful story..
Brands, retail chains and marketplace aggregators are engaged in a thick battle with each other for eCom pie, each trying to outspend the other to improve traffic and conversions.
Brands have been on an overdrive to shore up their D2C channel, offline retailer chains are using tech to leverage their offline retail footprint and customer data generated over the years, to build their eCom story and marketplace aggregators having already cornered a lion’s share of the online shoppers in metro and tier-1 cities are making strong inroads into tier 2 & 3 towns. They are now moving towards adoption of eCommerce 3.0.
eCommerce 3.0 has been about evolution of monolithic eCom to headless commerce. Headless commerce is a separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application. This architecture offers sellers freedom of expression to build whatever and however they want. Most importantly, it enables sellers to enrich the customer experience.
eCom tech evolution has been super focused towards providing a consistent and seamless purchase experience for customers across various touch points.
Its amazing how many applications and services are available at a micro level to help optimize sales cycle from traffic generation to checkout and delivery. We have specific applications and services that can help improve traffic to the stores, measure and improve ROI on digital ad spends, optimize user journey, improve search & check out experience, perform risk analysis based on payment modes and credit history, optimize shipping and delivery experience and improve customer retention.
It is, however, very unfortunate that very little has been done to improve and optimize fulfillment experience.
Brands and retailers, who worked together in offline mode are each trying to outspend each other in trying to create their own delivery structures to get goods to their online customers.
Existing eCom tech simply cannot assimilate complex supply chain structures encompassing hundreds of thousands of channel partners that have been driving merchandising, replenishment and fulfillment across millions of retail outlets in the country.
Hence brands and retailers have been driven to spend billions in ramping up supply chain infrastructure to optimize costs and match delivery metrics and delivery experience of players like Amazon and Flipkart.
They have been a victim of two tier technology structure which necessitates them to compress all sales and fulfillment activity between a single layer of buyer and seller.
While strategically it makes sense for brands, retailers and marketplaces to compete with each other for online traffic, they can still collaborate to optimally utilize existing fulfillment networks and generate significant cost savings 1) avoiding capex investments 2) reducing variable shipping costs.
We at Atto are trying to bring in eCommerce 3.0 to the supply chain as well through our proprietary micro-store technology.
While eCommerce 1.0 largely meant owned inventory & logistics play with each of the players having to invest heavily in creating their own ware house & delivery infrastructure to ensure customer delight, eCommerce 2.0 has seen more of 3PL (3rd party logistics ) players filling up the gap between well invested incumbents and new players.
While more and more enterprises with existing sales and distribution networks look to onboard the e-commerce bus, they are looking at technology that can help them seamlessly serve offline and online customers without too much of a disruption to their offline structures.
Atto Market is enabling collaborative omni-channel commerce.
The unique micro-store technology enables OEMs to configure their web-shop as a collection of sub-stores managed by their distributors / retail partners. OEMs can configure the sub-store by allocating geography of operation, products, pricing & offers as well as regulatory workflows required in the particular location. Language and content can also be customized at a sub-store level. Distributors can configure inventory, set up drop-ship rules, link payment gateways and bank accounts to the store.
Customers are routed to the sub-store based on the delivery location and their orders are fulfilled by the local channel partner of the OEM. This allows OEMs to offer convenience of ecommerce to B2B and B2C customers with a local touch, saving huge operational and set-up costs while getting a huge ROI on digital marketing.
A move to collaborative omnichannel commerce can help brands, offline retailers and marketplace aggregators to utilize existing offline fulfillment network of distributors and retail outlets.
To know more about our platform and service offerings, reach out to us at contactus@doctorsbazaar.com
