As brands struggle to react to the COVID-19 pandemic, and all the challenges it presented, one thing is clear – direct to consumer ecommerce is skyrocketing. We’re seeing the same trend with our clients, no matter the vertical, consumers are clearly looking to find new ways to get the goods they need without leaving the house. This trend will continue beyond COVID as the simple ease of online shopping becomes habit for items users previously bought in stores.
Of course, Amazon and Walmart sales channels will still be a key part of any brand’s online commerce strategy, but delayed delivery times are leading users to go direct to the merchant’s website for the purchase. Brands who sell direct to consumer know that delivering a great user experience helps close the sale. Impactful product imagery, in depth information about the products, social proof that products are loved, ratings, specs, brand storytelling, and lifestyle content all build that experience in ways Amazon cannot.
What we’ve found is that brands who are looking to deliver world class user experiences for direct to consumer commerce are adopting a best of breed strategy – employing a CMS as well as an ecommerce system to meet the demands of the user base. We prefer BigCommerce, an open SAAS ecommerce platform that allows for integrations with any CMS.
The implementation depends on the needs, but with robust APIs available on both CMS and ecommerce platforms, the choice is up to you.
- You can go fully headless and let the CMS drive the experience
- You can use the hand off approach and have the CMS control everything up to the checkout and pass to the ecommerce system for the transaction
- You can build a reverse integration where the ecommerce platform made calls back to the CMS to build out robust sales driven screens.
If your brand is new to ecommerce or not, if it’s shifting from B2B or retail to DTC, if it’s just looking to deliver a more compelling user experience, consider investing in your consumers and deliver a seamless shopping experience. Stop trying to make a single platform do what it’s not meant to – leverage a content management system along-side an ecommerce platform and focus on the user’s experience with your brand.
Contact our team to learn more and to discover how brands such as Duxiana, Sharp Electronics and others are optimizing for the ecommerce shift.