eCommerce
Modified: 2024-04-10 (10:21 PM CDST)
E-commerce began in the 1970s. Amazon and eBay revolutionized the area and made buying from home commonplace. Covid-19 stimulated eCommerce as buyers were reluctant or unable to shop in stores. eCommerce has become, for many, the first stop in their shopping. New methods of eCommerce are evolving including delivering goods to the home. Malls, too, have suffered greatly because of the combiation of Covid-19 and e-commerce.
History of eCommerce
eBay and Amazon
- First successful sites
- "deep pockets" required (meaning both had to have enough capital to sustain themselves before being profitable)
- Our class's sale item on eBay in 2020:


- Payments
- PayPal
- Founded as Confinity is 1998
- PayPal began in 2002 and then became part of eBay
- Spun off as own company in 2015
- Revenue # 25 on Fortune 500 in 2019
- Recently (2021), eBay replaced PayPal for its payments to sellers
- Credit Cards (from Experian)
- Diners Club in 1950 was first card
- Credit itself is much older:
- Code of Hammurabi established lending and credit (1750 BCE)
- Became common in Middle Age Europe
- Banks
- Rulers used credit extensively
- Watch these short Videos:
- e-Commerce Trends
- Consumption change
- Moving to: healthcare, fast moving consumer goods (beverages, OTC drugs, more)
- Moving away from: restaurant, travel, luxury goods
- e-Commerce growing

- Advertising costs increasing
- Will require more professional and focused advertising campaigns
- "Smarketing": chatbots, e-mail, social media
- Better and more simplistic design
- Better "delivery comfort"
- Quick, affordable, and local delivery
- Reduced cost of entry
- eCommerce web sites: cheaper and more quickly set up
- Offline to online transitions
- Moving sales from brick and mortar to online
- Lockdown has increased online business
- Amazon was losing clients
but has made a comeback via:
- quicker shipping (2 to 3 days)
- running promotions
- better safety measures in its warehouses
- hired new employees
- Suburban malls making a comeback?
- Occupancy rates in suburban malls is down from 2020
- Will these brick-and-mortar institutions survive?
- See the comments in the page above.
- Occupancy rates were down
- Tomorrow's shopping mall is taking shape today
- Details how many stores closed
- Discusses changes taking place in malls
- Many stores now selling in physical locations and online
- Those include: ship-from-store, buy online and pick up at store, and pickup in a locker
- There is an Amazon Hub Locker in Magnolia at the Magnolia Travel Center
- Some malls now offering entertainment options including indoor ski slopes and art exhibits
- Many malls are being repurposed: high schools, senior housing, or office complexes
- Analytics
- Answers questions such as:
- How to track how many people visit your website?
- Where do your website visitors live?
- How to find the most popular pages of a website?
- What blog content do your visitors like the most?
- What is the best way to track referrals to your website?
- What marketing tactics drive the most traffic to your website?
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
- How can I improve your website’s speed?
- How many visitors has your site converted into leads or customers?
- Free shipping (or not)
- notice I offered free shipping for those jeans and for 2021 sale item
- psychological salesmanship, buyers more likely to buy with free shipping
- Web page above states:
- 90% of consumers view free shipping as the top incentive that would encourage them to shop online more often.
- 86% of shoppers abandon their shopping cart because of the cost of shipping.
- 93% of shoppers claim they will take action to qualify for free shipping by adding items to their cart.
- Geolocation and Customer Loyalty
- The increased use of mobile phones is disrupting e-commerce
- Real-time location-based targeting: finding customers near vendor
- Personalize communications based on points of interest: Add geolocation to other customer data
- Deliver conditional messaging for customers who are out of town: Target advertising to customer's locations
- Measure the effectiveness of marketing investments: Are customer loyalty programs working and where they are
- E-commerce Data Collected from Buyers
- What data to collect (general analytics):
- Name
- Age
- Contact Information
- Address
- Payment Information
- Interests
- Preferences
- Shopping behavior
- Collecting too little data or too much is not advised
- Improving Data Collection:
- Start with general analytics (see above), add:
- Categorize customers
- Win their trust
- Track their real time behavior online
- Analyze why they abandon shopping carts (note the metaphor!)
- Use their complaints and suggestions to improve you site
- Make sure data are secure!
- Set up programs that reward shopping such as: discounts, flash sales, or memberships
- Amazon Example: Video
- Notice how the original, simpler algorithms outperformed more complex ones
- Later, they created a new method, multi-layered neural networks, that took users interest in classic movies to predict a movie they would like to watch in the next week
- Interestingly, users wanted new movies to watch in the next week
- The model was simple and scalable, meaning it could be applied to all kinds of products, not just movies
- My new wallet (bought from Amazon)

- Since then, Amazon has sent me other wallets to look at:

- Of course, I'm not going to buy another wallet.
- I bought the wallet to deal with the large number of cards I must carry
- Now I keep getting e-mail trying to sell me similar wallets (see above)
- Other countries getting into eCommerce (Data below come from this site)

- Difference in gender purchasing patterns:

- Distribution Centers Workings (Video)
- Steps
- Picking
- Staging
- Packaging
- Shipping
- Parcel
- LTL-Less than truckload
- Containers
- Domestic
- International
- FYI: One of my college jobs was a picker at a paint distribution center.
- That was in pre-computer days and I picked orders.
- I was amazed when I discovered our re-labelling process.
- So, if a hardware store wanted some paint that they sold under their own name, I would have to take the right color paint (identified by a code) to the re-labelling room where they would take off the original label and put on the label of the hardware store.
- Online advertising
(Video)
- Shows:
- Kinds
- Relevance
- Reach customers
- Drives search engines
- Easy to start (for vendor)
- Segment customers
- Goals
- Product visibility
- Reaching customers otherwise hard to find
- Market Segmentation
- Main Types
- Demographic:
- Age,
- gender,
- ethnicity,
- income,
- education,
- religion,
- job role
- Psychographic:
- personality,
- hobbies,
- life goals,
- values,
- beliefs,
- lifestyle
- Geographic:
- country,
- region,
- city,
- zip code
- Behavioral:
- habits-spending,
- purchasing,
- browsing;
- brand interactions,
- brand loyalty,
- previous product ratings
- Other Types
- Technographic:
- personalization (for example Safari searchers typically use Apple products)
- Generational and Life Stage:
- marital status,
- children,
- home ownership
- Transactional:
- previous purchases or searches analyzed
- Delivery to home
- Walmart InHome
- Limited areas
- My sign up :-) attempt and Walmart's response:
-
Sorry, we don't deliver there yet.
Be the first to know when InHome makes it to 505 Hazel Cir, Magnolia, AR 71753.
- InHome Delivery is now available Walmart offers InHome delivery service in many areas, including:
- Atlanta,
- Austin,
- Dallas,
- Kansas City,
- Miami,
- Orlando,
- Phoenix,
- Pittsburgh,
- San Francisco,
- San Jose,
- Tampa,
- Washington D.C.,
- northwest Arkansas,
- and southeast Florida.
- OMG! People are allowing vendors to open their vehicles and enter their houses!
- Americans receive an average of 121 parcels/year
- Kardas Xmas 2019 (Note how my family added to that average!)
- Interactive e-mails
- Can browse, select, and buy directly from e-mail message
- these e-mails make it easier to buy because a click leads to a sale
Some Commerce Sites
- eBay
- Started in 1995 as AuctionWeb
- Seller ratings introduced in 1997
- Renamed as eBay in 1997 and went public in 1998
- eBay Motors started in eBay Motors
- FYI: my first item to sell was my 1952 Chevrolet Pick Up truck.
- It sold for nearly $5000 after failing to sell in Magnolia, Little Rock, and Dallas via classified ads.
- As I watched the last two bidders, one in Texas and the other in Kansas I was surprised when the winner was a bidder in Germany!
- I was paid soon and a few months later I put the truck onto a semi trailer at the Magnolia Travel Center. No free delivery on that sale. The buyer paid to have the truck shipped from New Orleans to Hamburg.
- PayPal acquired in 2001
- eBay app begins in 2008
- PayPal becomes own company 2015
- eBay begins to pay directly to sellers accounts (leaving PayPal)
- Prohibited items:
- Many adult items
- Drugs
- Firearms and weapons
- Government items
- Hazardous items
- Items encouraging illegal activity
- Lock picking devices
- Mailing lists
- Medicines
- Offensive material
- Police related items
- Prescription drugs
- Prohibited services
- Stolen property
- More details? Click HERE
- Gun Broker
- One of several sites where firearms and firearm accessories can be purchased
- eBay and many other eCommerce sites do not allow the sale of firearms (but eBay does allow sale of firearm accessories)
- Firearms must be sent to an FFL (Federal Firearm Licensed dealer)
- Craigslist Arkansas (Texarkana)
- All kinds of online eCommerce and more here:
- Community, Housing, Jobs, Services, Sale, Forums
- Columbia County Yard Sale
- FaceBook page for Columbia County Arkansas sale items
- Columbia County Man Cave
- Another FaceBook page for Columbia County
- Walmart
- The Big Kahuna of retail
- But, was losing big money online in the past(-$2 billion)
- For fiscal 2022, the retail giant's ecommerce sales grew 90% compared with two years ago, before COVID-19 was widespread in the United States. For Q4, online sales grew 1% but 70% compared with two years ago.
- Walmart is now #2 in digital commerce rankings (Amazon is #1)
- Walmart is optimistic however.
- Walmart changing image from discounter to broader based market
- 2021 online sales up 70% over previous two years
- 2023 online sales exceeded $100 Billion
- Notice all of the Walmart employees shopping
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