Online Retailer Survey 2022 : success factors and omnichannel services in digital commerce
Creators: name: Zumstein, Darius
name: Oswald, Carmen
name: Brauer, Claudia
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2022
Subjects: 658.8: Marketingmanagement

description: The Swiss Online Retailer Survey 2022 is the fifth online retail survey the first author has conducted. A total of 625 online retailers participated in it, including business-to-consumer (88%), business-to-business (43%), and direct-to-consumer (13%) companies. In addition to 496 Swiss retailers, 109 Austrian online retailers also took part in the representative survey. After the boom in e-commerce in 2020 and 2021 due to the corona pandemic, normality has returned for many retailers. A large proportion of the online retailers surveyed mentioned that the lifting of the Coronavirus measures had no impact on their online business. Some report that they have seen a slight to strong decline in online sales and fewer online orders compared to the previous year. The study confirmed that online retailers are very broadly positioned in distribution and often sell through multiple sales channels such as online shops, physical stores, face-to-face sales and over-the-phone sales. Digital sales channels such as digital marketplaces (e.g., Digitec Galaxus and Amazon) and social commerce (e.g., Facebook marketplace and Facebook and Instagram shops) continue to grow. The results show that omnichannel retailers often offer both a broader range (with more product categories) and a deeper assortment (with more products in one category) online than in their physical stores. In the 2022 survey, the authors examined the success factors in e-commerce were examined for the first time: most frequently cited was the quality of the products or services offered, followed by their exclusivity. The analyses show that large, professional, and successful online shop operators are much more customer-oriented than the small and unsuccessful ones, and that they attach greater importance to user-friendliness, i.e., an optimal user experience in the online shop. A/B and multivariate tests are therefore used much more frequently by the successful and larger online shops than by the smaller ones. In digital marketing, they use them to optimize their advertising materials, call-to-actions, product pages, and the layout and ordering process in the online shop. For almost half of the large online shops, good digital marketing is a success factor; among the smaller ones, only one out of four reports that it is. Therefore, the large online retailers more actively use a broader range of marketing tools such as search engine marketing, newsletters, and social media marketing. In B2B, high product availability is also often critical to success. The study also shows that many retailers can and should further expand their online product ranges, as almost half of the online shops offer a small assortment of 999 items or fewer. Looking at the e-commerce key figures, the conversion rate, i.e., the proportion of web shop visitors who place an order, is often low (below 3%) in the clothing, furniture, electronics, toys, and sporting goods sectors. Computers and event tickets often have a high conversion rate of over 8%. The results also show that successful online shops practically always have a higher conversion rate than the unsuccessful ones. The often-discussed return rate is very low for many retailers, below 1%. In particular, books, cosmetics, food, and toys are very rarely returned. Only in the product category of clothing and sporting goods is the return rate very high, often over 20%. The big challenges in e-commerce are currently in procurement and in the level of competition in the market. Some products are no longer available from manufacturers, importers, or large suppliers; international supply chains have been partially interrupted or have become slower. More than half of online retailers currently complain about rising fuel and logistics costs. The Ukraine war and inflation are also causing purchasing, logistics, and sales prices to rise. In general, long delivery times, delays, products that cannot be delivered, and shortages of raw materials are the most frequently cited problems. Many online retailers are also challenged when it comes to staffing levels due to the lack of skilled workers and expertise. In terms of payment methods, mobile payment continues to gain ground: TWINT eclipsed payment on account among Swiss online merchants in 2022, becoming the second most important payment method in Switzerland after credit cards. In Austria, Klarna has also made strong gains in market share on both the customer and merchant sides.