Digital Transformation: The Challenges

What do you want to purchase? Groceries, Electronics, Ready Meals, Books. Yes, all are available online, with many choices, anytime. Most of you think that having an e-commerce platform is easy as opening a shop and start selling for walk-in customers. Maybe it’s, if the platform is not linked to any existing physical shop, so the business is a purely online business. But, what if the business is brick & mortar?

“Ecommerce isn’t the cherry on the cake, 
it’s the new cake”

Jean Paul Ago, CEO, L’Oreal

Today, developing an e-commerce site is easy from a technical perspective, as many plug-ins and features are available online. So, we are able to see on daily basis ads for new sites & applications selling online, and from these ads, we view some existing known brands that have launched e-commerce platforms alongside their physical shops.

In the first part, where the business is building a new site without having a physical store, the easiness here is creating the business process, system & strategy from scratch based on selling online. While in the part of brands with physical shops, many challenges and obstacles are faced before the launch and still exist on the daily operations.

From my experience, the first challenge e-commerce leads will face is the mentality of their colleagues, as most of them prefer to shop in the stores and believe that most of the customers have the same interest. Regardless, the Covid-19 pandemic supported changing the mindset of a huge percentage of these people.

Now, in the strategic part, companies are going digital either to have an online presence or they are believing that e-commerce is the future of the world. Currently, both types are aiming to maintain offline sales and avoiding their e-commerce channels to acquire from their offline customers & sales. Here, the e-commerce manager works on a strategy to acquire online customers from competitors and/or to deliver a message to the brand customers announcing the online presence shyly.

Another challenge is the existing systems; it’s obliging to develop the e-commerce backend based on specific algorithms & metrics. Here, the most important part is having the tool which can provide live visibility on the product details as many commercial teams get used to change product descriptions, category mapping, and prices without taking into consideration that the e-commerce platform should reflect the same. On the other hand, the e-commerce platforms have the ability to show the wrong jobs done on the back ends, mainly the wrong mapping and descriptions. In this condition, the end-user could buy the wrong product or could view a product under the wrong category.

Reaching the biggest part, marketing and communication, this field covers most of the challenges between the old school marketer and the digital gurus.

Starting from the onsite marketing, the challenge starts between offline marketing & e-commerce marketing as the first get used to create content and publish ads based on stocks and offers availability while the second knows that data is the key content creator since e-commerce platforms should always run creatives as per the daily/weekly users’ interests in addition to the promotional creatives.

“You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. 
If you really want to succeed you have to create traffic.”
Joel Anderson, CEO, Walmart

The onsite marketing reflects the same challenge on the digital marketing & CRM, as offline marketing always would like to publish promotional ads and could boost them without building campaigns objectives and the same happens with CRM tool as they always think that they should publish the same content at the same time on all available platforms. In parallel, the e-commerce marketer works on acquiring & retargeting campaigns that could increase the ROI by building campaigns and creating creatives based on the available online data and sometimes could be supported by the physical stores' data. 

Last but not least, the loyalty program. Companies that have a loyalty program, built it based on the points collection and/or Cashback. If I say now that this type of program is only for offline stores, many of the OMNI Channel experts will say that a digital transformation should consider the customer as one customer in any physical store or any digital platform, which is true. So, the companies should update their loyalty program to a program that works with the online & physical stores. The e-commerce loyalty programs are based on referrals and on coupon-based which is an instant discount on the purchase or the next purchase. The update can be by making the redemption applicable for online and offline stores, but the earning based on the channel and many creative ideas can be implemented.

Finally, the above criticism expresses my personal opinion based on my previous experience and can be changed with new discussions and coming new experiences.