What Brands Must Do to Embrace Modern Commerce

Ecommerce data and analytics

In the fight for consumer loyalty, brands face an unprecedented struggle to meet customer needs while balancing new complexities in their marketing, commerce channels, supply chain and operations.

Chief among those complexities right now, of course, is COVID-19. An increase in online spending means consumer demand is overtaxing companies trying to scale their services. At WBX Commerce we’ve experienced exponential growth in the first quarter of this year, pointing to an immediate need for marketplace management and fulfillment solutions that are seamless for both the brand and the consumer.

Over the past several months key marketplaces and carriers have had little choice but to change their services and processes (Read more on this from the WBX Commerce COVID Flash Alerts Blog Post. Brands looking to thrive in modern commerce must now prioritize the following four areas:

• Vertical Integration: Enlist partners to manage ecommerce or wholesale supply processes and execute marketplace sales strategy while integrating supply and demand to maintain continuity and optimize opportunities and customer experience.
• Data and Insights: Invest time in identifying, accessing, analyzing, and applying the right data using insights from across all channels.
• Marketplace Strategy: Explore all options, including expanding your presence from online to in-person or from brick-and-mortar to ecommerce.
• Omnichannel Fulfillment: Pooling inventory in one network, and with one partner, ensures a brand’s inventory is ready and available to any and all desired channels and affords a brand transparency and visibility into their sales and logistics across all channels.

As consumers seek a more convenient lifestyle and work-from-home situations experience indefinite extensions, the commerce challenges associated with the general growth in ecommerce will continue to present new dynamics and choices for consumers.

Brands must respond accordingly.

Should brands focus commerce efforts purely online or diversify via in-store partnerships or marketplaces? How do these choices impact brands’ supply chain and operations? How can brands effectively and cost-efficiently manage the complexities of fulfillment and omnichannel sales?

Our CEO, Marcus Startzel, answers these questions and more in a recent article on Forbes.com. Find the answers you need here.