The E-Commerce Evolution trend encompasses a new wave of globalization in the e-commerce market, with successful players exhibiting both innovative and effective supply chain strategies and marketing techniques to engage with customers.
Apart from offering inexpensive products, successful companies are leveraging discovery-based shopping and gamification to keep consumers glued to their platforms, while incorporating influencer marketing as well as mobile and social commerce. This especially appeals to the younger generation – Generation Z and Millennials who are more price sensitive and digitally confident.
Many e-commerce and social commerce players are already aggressively expanding their presence and operations internationally; an example of this is current competition in the US between Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop. This is why, here at DHL, we see the realization timeline for this trend within the next five years.
The success of e-commerce and social commerce companies joining this evolution will depend on not only their digital marketing strategies and social media integration (merging shopping and entertainment to engage website visitors with so-called shoppertainment) but also their data-driven management of the supply chain, specifically their network of suppliers and sellers. Also crucial to success will be the ability to sustainably offer products at low prices, taking into account the costs associated with international deliveries.
The impact of this trend on logistics will be high, as it significantly impacts cross-border deliveries and global supply chains.
The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the e-commerce sector, pushing regular online shoppers and traditional brick-and-mortar shoppers towards digital platforms due to lockdown and health concerns, and today we see a drastic shift in consumers’ daily routines in the digital realm. By 2025, McKinsey estimates cross-border e-commerce in goods will expand to around US$ 500 billion and reach $1 trillion by 2030.
The evolution of e-commerce is largely shaped by the behaviors and preference of Gen Z and Millennial consumers, the growth of data and artificial intelligence (AI), and the fact that Chinese e-commerce and tech companies are turning their attention overseas. Along with accelerated global trade, other phenomena driving this trend include social media integration and eventually data crawling (the automated process of systematically exploring the internet and indexing data sources).