How can the ecommerce industry attain sustainable growth?
Notes from The Delivery Conference.
E-commerce and delivery experts gathered in London earlier this year to hear from industry leaders on delivery, customer experience and expectation, cross-border trade, logistics and supply chain strategy.
Scurri gathered notes from the main talks on the day.
Speaker: Martijn Bertisen, UK Sales Director for Google. Martijn is a Google veteran, having worked for the company since 2007. He is Google’s sales director for the UK and he talked about attaining sustainable growth for the ecommerce industry.
Consumers are faced with overwhelming choices, because of this they will only gravitate towards the companies that are disruptive enough to cut through the noise and help them make choices.
He said that while traditional retail was all about price, range and assortment, digital retail is based around convenience.
That’s why all these apps are flourishing – because they help the customers.
Martijn Bertisen,
UK Sales Director for Google.
Bertisen says that traditional and digital retail seem to go hand in hand. 80% of the UK adult population has bought online, but in the same light 80% of retail still happens in the physical space, says Bertisen. He adds that the digital retail industry has doubled in the last 12 years, though physical stores are still popular.
Image c @shdlogistics
Although the digital retail industry manages to solve most of its challenges, new ones are continually arising.
Bertisen told delegates that the digital retail space was disrupted by smartphones, and expects it to be disrupted further by machine learning and artificial intelligence. He gave the example of Amazon, that uses a multimillion-dollar personalisation engine that generates 30% of all sales. He also mentioned Ocado, which uses Google Cloud’s natural language recognition machine to optimise their customer service.
Image c @shdlogistics
Bertisen’s third example was inbound emails that are now embracing a machine learning model to read the sentiment within an email. The model, he says, prioritises important business emails and queues them on top of the list. He noted that most people would be surprised to realise that 7% of email do not need their attention.
With this email model that costs a couple of hundred pounds to run in a month, you improve the response time by four times while achieving efficiency of 7%.
Martijn Bertisen,
UK Sales Director for Google.
In addition to the above, Bertisen talked about speed and its overall importance for all businesses.
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AUTHOR
Alan O’Rourke Marketing Specialist, Scurri