The Era of Showrooming and Webrooming: In Conversation with Eddie Teng

The eCommerce industry is growing with all leaps and bounds. However, along with consumers adopting eCommerce fast, retailers are also trying everything possible to get the biggest piece of the pie.The goal of all brand marketers now is to remain ahead of the curve and find trends that will help them boost sales and bring customers. While there is a lot of information available online about the emerging trends and technologies in the online retail world, we have collected key insights from industry experts on what the future of online shopping holds. Let’s meet with our next expert of the series, Eddie Teng.

Q1: What exciting projects are you working on right now?

I am currently reworking the brand.com shopping experience supported by a marketplace infrastructure, where we see multiple resellers or fulfillment partners unified into a single touchpoint that is familiar to our customers. With this change, we will be able to consolidate all our sales channels into one, complementing our core business and digital business.With the ever-changing shopping behavior, e-commerce is no longer just a single channel model.

Q2: What potential do you see for the eCommerce industry as a whole?

The future of eCommerce lies a lot on the expectation of the shoppers’ experience. From a recent study conducted by Shopify and Forrester Consulting, it is expected that 59% of consumers are likely to look at a product online and buy it in-store (webrooming), and 54% are likely to look at a product in-store and buy it online (showrooming) over the following year.

This is where brands and businesses need to recognize the potential of integrating their sales channels for a unified omnichannel shopping experience.

Q3: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in post-pandemic eCommerce trends?

eCommerce has been rapidly migrating to social platforms ever since the pandemic and this phenomenon is known as Social Commerce. In China alone, Social Commerce amounted to US351.6B in sales in 2021, and this growth can be seen from the efforts of brands and businesses in APAC, leveraging social platforms to sell their products.

Within this change, it is also the element of live streaming that helps accelerate the growth of social commerce, as suggested by the 61% growth in Livestream selling app installs globally between January 1, 2021, and September 30, 2021, compared to the same time period in 2020 from Shopify’s internal data.

Q4: What industries do you think will take the biggest piece of the pie due to this surge in eCommerce?

Consumers-centric industries will continue to reap the benefits of eCommerce but principle brands will take the biggest piece of reward as the consumer journey is streamlining to a brand-to-consumers, a more direct approach from the previous brand-to-retailers-to-consumers.With the surge of eCommerce and marketing technology, brands are now able to “talk” directly and effectively to their customers, eliminating the reliance on retailers to do that for them.

Q5: Any specific technology trend where store owners should consider investing?

As it gets more and more expensive to advertise especially in this day and age, it is important that brands, businesses, and store owners shed the reliance on third-party data when talking to their customers.

They need to invest in building up the first-party data of their customers. By saying so, it’s not just having a CRM system to house all your customers’ information, from their age, gender, where they live, etc. it’s about understanding their likes, and dislikes, their interactions with your brand and products. That is why having a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is important for store owners to consider investing in.

Wrapping Up

In this chapter, we interviewed Eddie Teng, an expert digital marketing professional, and eCommerce enthusiast. He unraveled several important trends and technologies likely to turn the eCommerce world upside down shortly. Hope you find this conversation insightful!