As Physical Retail Resurges, These eCommerce Leaders Are Doubling Down On Digital

While some shoppers are flocking back to stores, the idea that the pandemic has irreversibly changed shopping behaviors still appears to have merit. 

To compete with pure-play eCommerce giants like Amazon, retailers invested heavily in digital capabilities throughout the pandemic. These investments include at-home delivery or in-store pickup models, launching their own marketplaces, and launching their own retail media programs. 

Tracking this surge in retailers’ digital capabilities and overall shopper sentiment, analytics firm Edge by Ascential predicted that online sales will account for almost 40% of all chain retail sales by 2026.

The murky sub-category of “digitally influenced” sales is also starting to become more defined.  39% of shoppers will not buy in-store without reading online reviews first. And 69% of in-store shoppers prefer to look up product reviews on their smartphones instead of speaking to a store associate.

But digital initiatives still struggle to fit into the agenda of retail brands.  “Despite all this retail disruption, some organizations and leaders are still behaving like sheep,” says Chris Perry, co-founder of the eCommerce education startup firstmovr, who published a position piece on the issues that eCommerce leaders continue to face in their organizations. Perry says that what’s at stake is not just the end customer – merchants and buyers from physical retail stores are taking cues from the online world. “Target and Walmart are bringing in a lot of digital native brands into physical store,” Perry says. “Why is that? [these brands] may be exclusive to that store, and they also recognize these high growth digital brands as where the growth is coming from. This is why winning the ‘digital shelf’ is important.” 

Organizational silos, shortsighted goals, risk aversion, and bureaucracy are cited as the main barriers for retail brands to make real progress with their digital initiatives. 

At an online event by firstmovr yesterday, three digital and eCommerce leaders from national brands shared their experiences and strategies for getting more alignment and better results for their digital efforts. 

“It’s not brick and mortar versus eCommerce”

“People think it’s brick and mortar versus eCommerce,” says Diana Haussling, VP/GM Digital commerce at Colgate-Palmolive.

“The reality is we are human and we shop all the various modalities and channels.”

Haussling says that bureaucracy is one of the most insidious challenges that a brand may face in achieving its ecommerce aspirations.   “You have to be able to move quickly and jump on the cultural relevancies of the moment. For example, linking national media to a specific retail site. But how we manage P&Ls or processes sometimes don’t allow us to move quickly or engage with consumers.” Haussling noted that while many larger CPG brands recruit talent from startups in a bid to kickstart growth, they can quickly be mired in bureaucracy. 

Tactics that Haussling suggested could move the needle is to embed ecommerce professionals within the organization, so that ecommerce becomes part of the DNA of the company rather than a discrete function. 

She also highlighted that internal advocacy is necessary. Understanding who the decision-makers are versus whose opinions you’re never going to change is key in understanding who you should be ‘selling’ your ideas to. 

“Risk aversion is often rooted in the culture”

Tiffany Tan, Head of eCommerce Growth Accelerator at The Clorox Company, says that while risk aversion may be part of a company’s culture, there is an opportunity to flip the script. “eCommerce is inherently risk-mitigating,” Tan says.  “Metrics will tell you pretty quickly if you’ve made the right call. eCommerce actually has mechanisms that inherently modify risk.” 

“Silos exist – even in ecommerce”

Pearlstein, whose remit spans all online channels for Bayer, says that much work and effort is duplicated across teams because of organizational silos. This is unfortunate because most issues or opportunities that a team faces on a given digital channel has likely been experienced elsewhere in an organization.  

Pearlstein says that the key to internal buy-in for digital initiatives is having visual representation. “If I can show progress as ‘red, yellow or green’, I can more easily make the business case for resources to close a gap,” he says.