The Perceived Value Of E-Commerce Technologies

August 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Steve Rowen, Retail Systems Research (RSR)

Retail winners are embracing new technologies in e-commerce to be succcessful.

In our latest research, we ask retailers to rate their perceived value of e-commerce technologies. Their top three are online analytics (56% cite them as very valuable), product reviews (52%), and product recommendations (50%); see figure below. This is highly consistent with previous years’ research and continues to prove that retailers see their safest bets as those technologies which give the seller insight into customer behavior as well as those that give consumers the confidence to buy based on other buyers’ feedback. These are essentially bread-and-butter issues for successful e-commerce selling in the modern day, and to further prove that point, retail winners have a disproportionate appetite for each: 80% of winners see high value from online analytics compared to only 43% of laggards.