Digital Commerce Gartner Hypecycle 2022. Key Future Commerce Trends Explained.
Hi, I have recently stumbled upon latest Gartner's Digital Commerce Hypecycle and I thought me and my colleagues we'll put together a glossary explaining some new technologies that are approaching fast eCommerce (subject lines link to articles with more comprehensive explanations of the trends)
Emotion AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that measures, understands, simulates, and reacts to human emotions. It will, for eg. measure your facial expression patterns and voice inflections during watching a commercial, deduce the emotion they are connected to and try to improve the content to meet the expected reaction. My guess is, that in the future it will be whatever input data it gets, to cross-check facial expression. Maybe a pulse from your smartwatch?
Already in use in advertising, self-reporting, call centers, mental health, assistive services, automotive.
This is the technology meant for retail, aimed directly to make it more competitive towards eCommerce. The term is intended to cover all forms of checkout infrastructure that automate or remove elements of the payment process. This can be a multitude of different elements and techniques such as totally checkout-less shopping, cashier-based automatic payment, and automatic item scanning and bagging. Other retail technologies include beacons (first introduced by Apple in 2013), RFID (a tracking technology that involves small tags that emit distinct signals), and robotics (a new area of in-store technology with highly disruptive potential).?
The integration of AI in retail will allow for better personalization and marketing, improved customer service, and accurate demand forecasting.?
As Capgemini forecasts , it is very difficult to distinguish retail segments best suited for this technology. Fashion and DIY are perceived difficult. Convenience the most promising.
Frontend as a service platforms enable eCommerce brands to build, test, and deliver engaging frontend experiences, faster, better, and more cost-efficient. It handles all of the design and coding needs for eCommerce stores. FEaaS platforms follow the headless commerce principles, which means they are separated from the commerce backend, focusing exclusively on the frontend experience. Then, a commerce platform like Shopify and other necessary tools can be integrated using APIs.?
The difference between headless and FEaaS is that in the case of headless the entire frontend and connections to the backend and other microservices need to be built from scratch. It's a long process that requires months of heavy-duty development work and the necessary investment.
A FEaaS platform has pre-built everything you need, from the API connections to the deployment architecture, which allows you to build shopping experiences in a matter of hours.
FEaaS is the most promising technology of the Composable Commerce idea, according to Gartner.
Composable commerce is a development approach of selecting best-of-breed commerce components and combining or ‘composing’ them into a custom application built for specific business needs.?
Composable commerce achieves this through combining or composing Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). Each PBC is a feature or capability of the application and is typically third-party software components. For example, a PBC could be shopping cart and checkout, promotions, or a business user.?
They’re different from regular software applications because instead of offering, for example, a complete mobile payment system like PayPal, a PBC might offer a shopping cart microservice that deducts items from inventory and lets customers complete the checkout process, while a separate PBC handles order fulfillment. Think of a PBC as a building block within a larger software application. Rather than sharing a unified codebase, as with monolithic applications, each PBC holds its own data and business logic.??
Source: Gartner. Basically, composable commerce architecture leverages modern technologies like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) and JAMstack (Javascript, APIs, and Markup) to enable businesses to integrate and combine these building blocks in virtually limitless ways.
Gartner currently sees four main ways to integrate and present digital commerce and related experiences:
The use of FEaaS is the only option that the Gartner experts don't list any disadvantages.
Thing commerce is where connected machines, such as smart home appliances and industrial equipment, will make buying decisions for people by either taking direction from customers or by following a set of rules, context and individual preferences. Thing Commerce will ultimately include buying things, reporting a problem, requesting services and negotiating a deal.
Sounds like a decentralized virtual assistant, actually doing things for you. This is the direct consequence of the Internet of Things development.
CIAM tools manage identity, authentication and authorization for external identity use cases. Privacy regulations and increased dependence on remote interactions have intensified the importance of CIAM to businesses and their customers.
“CIAM also leads to improved user experience (UX) within B2C and B2B commerce, gig economy and government to citizen (G2C) interactions,” said Shen. “By the end of 2021, 86% of organizations will compete based on UX. In industries with very little competitive differentiation between products and services, the online experience becomes the differentiation.”
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Digital wallets establish credentials to enable users to make remote or face-to-face transactions from connected devices. This technology has demonstrated wide benefits, such as reduced customer effort and increased revenues, as has been demonstrated successfully in industries, such as parking, transportation, retail and digital commerce. Lack of digital wallet support could impact conversion rates and be viewed as a competitive disadvantage.??
A VCA is an application that engages, delivers information and/or acts on behalf of an organization’s customer. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of VCAs, pushing some use cases into the mainstream adoption phase, but new use cases in healthcare or brand marketing are also emerging.
As VCAs are now the first point of contact to support multiple customer interactions via digital engagement channels, they can be used to deliver proactive advice and engagement to build loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Visual configuration enables sales representatives and end customers to see a visual representation of products they want to order with the options and features they have selected. It is more relevant for B2B transactions where it can enable customers to purchase complex manufactured goods via digital commerce with no training. Organizations that are among the first to adopt it in their industries see substantial competitive advantage and cost savings.
Recent improvements in technology, such as improved photorealism, are leading to rapid growth and wider adoption of visual configuration among digital commerce businesses.
The customer technology platform (CTP) approach enables an organization to align customers’ “outside-in” view of the organization’s customer experience with the overall technology needed to support the “inside-out” delivery of the organization’s CX vision and strategy. This will enable the organization to build a CTP that supports a holistic and complete view of the customer experience.
The customer technology platform business capabilities and technology reference models will enable organizations to:
Digitalization of the customer experience has exposed process gaps and disconnected customer-facing processes to customers. This is due to CRM applications that were implemented solely to automate individual processes. Application leaders need to address these gaps by viewing CRM applications in the context of CX-centric application strategy that goes beyond mere CRM. Using a CTP approach to CRM applications can resolve these customer facing gaps and lead to improved customer experiences.
Digital Experience Composition is an emerging technology used to orchestrate multiple digital experiences in a headless, decoupled, composable tech stack. These tools provide API connectivity to headless services and allow developers to create digital experiences and hand the day-to-day management in no-code environments back to digital teams and business users.?
The term was coined by Gartner in 2022, but the technology has been available under other product names for approximately four years.?
Connected to the broader term The Composable Enterprise, described in Composable Digital Experience Manifesto
A digital sales room is a centralized location or microsite where sales reps and buyers can collaborate and access content that is relevant to the deal cycle. Digital sales rooms are a secure environment where sellers can create differentiated stories and personalized interactions that support buyers throughout their decision-making process.
Digital Sales Rooms are sometimes referred to as “client portals,” though Nancy Nardin from Smart Selling Tools notes that “Digital Sales Room” has become the de facto name for this technology since Gartner coined the term in a 2020 study.?
Digital shelf analytics are the suite of KPIs that CPGs use to track, measure, improve and predict their product’s digital commerce performance. They usually exist in the form of a platform or an interface that a data analytics solution provider offers.
A good platform is customizable and relieves a manufacturer of the arduous task of manually collecting, cleaning and interpreting data.
“The objective of digital shelf software is to understand your brand’s performance on the shelf so that you can improve it.”
-Yacine Terki, CEO, Data Impact by NielsenIQ
Integrating a digital shelf management tool comes with tons of benefits, such as automating the process of confirming product limits. This frees your staff to focus on high-volume tasks that add value to the brand, as well as enhance customer experience.
Other benefits include gaining insights into digital shelf metrics for brands, which can help gauge the performance of various sales campaigns. At its core, digital shelf monitoring allows retailers to map product information on the right touchpoints for greater visibility.
Have a great week!
Greg
Head of E-Commerce | Digital Transformation Executive | Scrum Product Owner
2 年Excellent, valuable article. Personally, I see the concept of MACH becoming increasingly popular in the literature.
Marketing & PR | Innovation | Growth | Digital Marketing | Digital transformation | Data & analytics | MarTech
2 年Thank you for clarifing some of terms.?
Chief Marketing Officer @ Toly Products
2 年Thanks for sharing the knowledge - indeed very well presented :)
Owner & CEO at iundf Marketing Technology AG
2 年well explained - thx!