By 2015, companies will generate 50 percent of Web sales via their social presence and mobile applications, according to Gartner, Inc.
Vendors in the e-commerce market will begin to offer new context-aware, mobile-based application capabilities that can be accessed via a browser or installed as an application on a phone.
Gartner analysts discussed the future of e-commerce at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, taking place here through today. As the number of mobile phones overtakes PCs, customers will use mobile browsers and applications as the main points of interaction.
Gene Alvarez, research vice president at Gartner says.
"E-commerce organizations will need to scale up their operations to handle the increased visitation loads resulting from customers not having to wait until they are in front of a PC to obtain answers to questions or place orders. In time, e-commerce vendors will begin to offer context-aware mobile-shopping solutions as part of their overall Web sales offerings."
Mr. Alvarez said.
"Customers are clamoring for new and easy ways to interact with the organizations they deal with, and no company should think itself immune to this new business dynamic. As more people use smartphones, they will expect an extension of their customer experience to be supported by this kind of device while demanding that social aspects of the Web be intertwined with this experience. At the same time, organizations are looking toward new countries and regions for growth. As a result, it is time to take a fresh look at your organization's Web sales capabilities to ensure that social software, mobile technology and globalization are part of your organization's online future."
Industries such as entertainment, software development/publishing and media are being driven by fast-moving changes in their businesses, such as mobility, and the increasing number of mobile devices available to their buyers. Others are finding that sales of additional services and products can be added to their customer-service-focused websites. Due to consumerization, sites in all industries are being impacted by customer experience delivered in the retail space, as customers continue to use their online experiences as the benchmark by which to evaluate all others.
Gartner predicts that by 2013, 80 percent of North American and European online sellers will expand into Brazil, Russia, India, Africa, Japan or China. Organizations based in North America and Western Europe are already launching website-based sales operations in new countries, in the hope of expanding to new markets. These organizations believe that untapped countries can spur growth by enabling the enticing of potential customers who have never purchased from the organization, but who have a desire for its products.
Mr. Alvarez said.
"The increasing availability of access to the Internet via PCs, laptops and mobile devices is creating new sales channels in countries, because entry barriers are lowering, thereby increasing the number of online shoppers. By entering these countries via an Internet sales model, organizations can establish a presence in locations without having to create a physical sales location."
E-commerce managers in Type A (leading) organizations and industries, such as travel, hospitality, retail, consumer electronics, media and entertainment, will begin to take advantage of GPS location services enabled by phones to push personalized, location-based content to mobile devices for users who have subscribed to these services. This content will be created via the use of customer patterns and their link to driving sales. These organizations will also have connected (via Web browsers and mobile applications) to many social communities, enabling the organizations to tap into the social networks of customers and leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
COMMENTARY: At the Gartner Symposium/ITexpo held in Orlando in 2010, Gartner's David Cearley, discussed the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011.
Three big technologies have already started to make their impact in 2011:
Cloud computing - Vendors will go from experimentation to implementation. HP and IBM and Microsoft will come into the market with an expanded set of offerings. Apple just launched iCloud. Cloud service brokers will come into play. Public and private cloud computing, too.
Context-aware computing - All about my personal preferences: my social network, my favorities, my content, my connections. Context aware systems deliver things in a more customized fashion. Ensemble programming. The environment becomes the computer. I think that you can add augmented reality into the mix.
Mobile and tablet computing - The Era of the PC is over, not literally, but no longer dominates as the key device. The PC is not really replaced. Tablets like the iPad serve as an ignition point. Smartphones and tablets becomes as important as the PC. A lot of commerce will be initiated through mobile devices.
Mobile devices of all types: smartphones, tablets, game consoles, internet TV controllers and the like, will all become the key entry points for ecommerce. This is already happening. Payment by smartphone apps are already here. Barcode reading an item at a store, then doing online comparative pricing to find the best online deal, and initiating an order at the same time. We see this happening already.
Whether social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn will become the new ecommerce hubs of tomorrow remains to be seen. I have gone on the record, as have several ecommerce experts, that social networks have yet to prove their metal when it comes to ecommerce. We are still not seeing wholesale ecommerce vendors abandoning their regular ecommerce sites and embedding them within Facebook. A few have done this, but they are very few. The dollars to make s-commerce or f-commerce a reality are still not there (less than 4% of total ecommerce revenues within five years) and consumers must feel comfortable purchasing things online through their social networks. Privacy concerns have a lot to do with this. I will believe it when I see it.
Courtesy of an article dated October 19, 2011 appearing in Gartner
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