For ecommerce companies today, they are competing in the age of what we like to call the DTC age of ownership. The beauty of ecommerce when it started was how much less capital and overhead you needed than the traditional routes of retail or brick and mortar franchises. Since your infrastructure costs were insignificant, you could allocate those dollars towards customer acquisition. Now parry that with the early days of Google Adwords and Facebook ads where you could reach and convert customers for virtually pennies on the dollar and you begin to see how this industry grew so fast.
A lot has changed since then. Facebook went from being the most used social media app with an abundance of data to a social media incumbent pivoting towards building a new world in the metaverse. Paid search and paid social average CPC costs have continued to increase. Every category has a myriad of competitors to make market share extremely difficult. It's really hard to grow a B2C brand today.
Nonetheless, the moves by Disney this month are a wonderful indicator online businesses strategy isn't to try to compete in the open market but to focus on building your own ecosystem. They launched Disney+ as a way to enter the streaming content industry and be the sole source of their vast catalogue of movies and television shows. Today, Disney + went even further to experiment in the lands of content and ecommerce.
Starting this month, Disney+ announced that they will be rolling out native ecommerce features for subscribers where they can access exclusive merchandise across their army of top brands for purchase. When a viewer looks at the details of a show or movie on the platform, they may scan a QR code, sign in with their Disney+ login credentials, and purchase on their phones collectable merchandise while they continue to view content on the streaming platform. By doing this, they are creating another revenue source outside of just subscription dollars while also incentivizing consumers to become Disney+ subscribers if they want to have access to exclusive toys, merchandise and clothing.
What does this have to do with ecommerce companies? A few things:
1) DTC brands spend far more money on acquiring customers than they do on retaining them.
According to Shopify, brands are paying 5 times more for web traffic than they were previously.
2) You have a higher probability of selling to a current or former customer than a new one.
VWO shares that the possibility of selling to a new customer is 5-20 % while selling to a current one is 50-70%.
3) Marketing attribution is not a science.
A report by Allied Market Research showed the growth of the marketing attribution software industry from $3 billion in 2021 to $13 billion by 2031. Sounds like it's hard to know which ad channel or ad campaign is why your customer made that latest purchase.
4) Owning your own data is everything.
If you can identify tactics or software to help keep web visitors and customers on your website, you get data that you don't have to request or adjust from third-party platforms to improve the experience for your customers.
5) Owning your customer's experience increases brand loyalty.
Per a report by Gartner, CX drives 66% of a customer's brand loyalty. Give them the unique experiences they want!
If you are looking for ways to create your own ecosystem for your brand and keep visitors on your website, come talk to us at Reactive.
We built our product as a way to help brands create engaging, interactive live selling events natively on your website to decrease advertising costs and deliver experiences that consumers demand today.
If you are interested in bringing a live selling experience to your website, check out Reactive. Start your free trial now, or contact sales@reactive.live to request a live demo.
