Ecommerce Market Mood, Tech Changes & Cool Stuff – November 2023

Your monthly ecommerce technology roundup from experienced ecommerce consultants James Gurd and Paul Rogers.

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Tl;dr

• General market mood heading into November
• Key vendor platform news
• Major investments
• Trends and cool stuff

Introducing our new monthly mini-series, where experienced ecommerce consultants James Gurd and Paul Rogers step back to summarise what’s been happening with ecommerce technology in the past month.

Ecommerce is a fast-paced industry, with constant change, new market entrants and incumbents updating their products with new features and fixes. James & Paul spend a lot of time looking at technology, talking to agencies and technology vendors, so this series is a digest of what they’ve found interesting, what is worth ecommerce teams thinking about, as well as highlighting interesting stories and cool tools they come across in their day-to-day work.

Discussion notes

1. GENERAL MARKET MOOD
   • Lots of clients flat or even down for the month of September, slow month across core markets (slightly less so for US). Across our benchmarks, MoM growth was down from +20 to +6.
   • Market to date this year for big capital projects amongst SMEs has been much quieter, several projects deferred from the £10m – £50m segment.
2. VENDOR PLATFORMS
   • The obsession and enthusiasm for pushing composable as the panacea seems to have quietened, not that it’s not a viable and sensible strategy for some businesses but thankfully the evangelism over composable & headless as the default choice is less
   • Development agencies are seeing a ramp up in new business leads in Q3, increasing confidence in capex investment from ecom businesses
   • UK ecommerce vendor landscape is changing again, reflected in the platforms leading brands are selecting & how consultancies like Gartner are shaping their industry reports: mentions to Centra (Ted Baker, H&M Group, largest Scandinavian customer is $200m+) + Scayle (Niche Player from Gartner, platform grown out of a €5bn German retailer, end-to-end composable platform including commerce, PIM, OMS and more)
   • Expect to see more from these vendors in Q4 + 2024, and look out for their events – it pays to see what other tech companies are up to
   • Shopline making some moves with GTM and partner ecosystem, hired in some senior folk from BigCommerce with lots of experience and connections
   • Adobe still picking up some net new, but more in B2B from what I’ve seen
   • THG trying to tackle some of the frustrations of a proprietary stack by announcing some key new capabilities including headless ability, social commerce for TikTok
   • BigCommerce launched Harvey Nics – likely their biggest brand. They also launched White Stuff in the summer, whilst competitors like Boden have gone to Shopify
   • Interesting to see some homegrown super brands migrating to OTS best in breed platforms: example is Dollar Shave Club, Ordergroove to power subscriptions, Klaviyo for marketing automation, Gorgias for customer support, and Shopify for ecommerce
3. INVESTOR VIEW
   • M&A space has been interesting, Next has been buying up brands and migrating many onto its own retail platform, FatFace is the latest announced last week and confirmed in a £115m acquisition
     • DotDigital acquired fresh Relevance
     • Frasers Group bought SportsScheck – German sports retailer
     • Alongside this, Klaviyo IPOd – good initial response but relatively flat. Currently at $32 per share
     • Shopify invested in B2B marketplace Faire – interesting to see what this means for their Handshake site
4. TRENDS
   • Borderline obsession with generative AI, it’s the new buzzword but we’re seeing genuine practical use case for ecommerce including product content generation: speed up content publishing workflows by generating on-brand product copy, which can then be human proofread and tweaked by a specialist copywriter
5. FUN AND COOL:
   • What3Words announced a strategic partnership with Woosmap, a platform offering privacy-first geolocation APIs and SDKs. The partnership means online retailers, or businesses who collect addresses from their customers, can offer a user-friendly way to let them specify their exact location alongside a traditional postal address.
   • Twitter / X testing live shopping (Paris Hilton is the first POC)
   • TikTok checkout launched

Want to suggest a topic or guest for a future episode? Contact us via the website or on LinkedIn.