All The E-Commerce News You Missed During A Busy Q4
By: Rob Bettis
Tags: Black Friday, Ecommerce, Online Shopping, Online Marketing, Digital Marketing

the “ketchup issue”

Friends of the Pod

marketingland.com

The majority (60%) of listeners surveyed said they looked up a service or product after hearing it advertised on a podcast, and 25% reported that they ended up making the purchase.

Social & Search

Study Claims Instagram Engagement Has Been in Decline Since May — Search Engine Journal — www.searchenginejournal.com

According to the study, brands are suffering from this decline in engagement as well as individual influencers. Fashion influencers went from a maximum engagement rate of 4.3% on February 17 to a minimum of 2.4% on June 20 That represents a 44% decline in engagement, meaning influencers were reportedly hit harder than brands.

searchengineland.com

E-commerce advertisers spent 39% of their search budgets on Shopping campaigns and 37% of their social budgets on product ads in the third quarter of the year, according to new Kenshoo data.

EMarketer: Amazon search ads will cut into Google’s market share | Marketing Dive — www.marketingdive.com

Amazon’s revenue from search ads will jump 65% to $11.7 billion by 2021 as the e-commerce giant takes a bigger slice of Google’s market share in the U.S., eMarketer said in a forecast shared with Marketing Dive. Google’s share will slip to about 71% by 2021 from 73% this year as internet users turn to Amazon to start product searches, boosting its share of U.S. search ad revenue to 16% from 13% for the comparable periods. Amazon is the only company whose share of the U.S. search market will grow over the next few years, having already surpassed Microsoft to be the second-biggest ad platform for search.

Of course, YouTube remains the second largest search engine, but their ads fall into a different category than search.

Also, note the episerver.com article below that looks specifically at trends in the apparel industry, which differ from this trend.

Fighting Instagram’s $1.3 Billion Problem — Fake Followers | WIRED — www.wired.com

Has the influencer bubble burst?

The fake followers would fit in anywhere: padding out an obscure microinfluencer’s ranks, creating the illusion of customers for a would-be T-shirt seller, skulking among legions of real fans on celebrity accounts like Ellen DeGeneres’. A report by cybersecurity firm Cheq projects that these fake fans will cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019 alone. In the influencer economy, you’re paid in part for the size of your audience, which means that, if an influencer’s account is swarming with fake followers, brands are paying extra to reach people who don’t exist. Agencies and would-be sponsors know they’re being scammed, and are growing more vigilant. “In the last few years, we’ve started holding influencers accountable in their contracts,” says Gabrielle Vogt, senior manager of digital talent at influencer marketing agency HelloSociety. “They have to agree that they haven’t participated in comment pods, botting, or purchasing fake followers.” Let’s break down these forms of fakery. “Comment pods” (or “engagement pods”) are groups of influencers who agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to artificially drive up engagement and improve their algorithmic performance. “Botting” is using automated fake accounts — bots — to bolster an audience, à la the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency. In their contemporary form, “fake followers” are often real people, just not always the person they say they are, and, of course, not someone who is an actual fan (and hence, potential customer).

Holiday Recap

Holiday Online Shopping Trends 2019: Retailers Win with Customer Centricity — www.episerver.com

This report from Episerver provided some great insight on the upcoming holiday season, including:

Of the gifts online shoppers will buy this year, 42 percent expect to purchase all or most of them via Amazon. However, the majority (47 percent) will buy few or none of their gifts via Amazon. Retailers can compete by offering personalized, customer-centric experiences.

And…

When it comes to apparel shopping, more consumers turn to a brand or retailer’s website (43 percent) than Google (29 percent) or Amazon (30 percent).

PwC: 54% of consumers to shop online for the holidays | Retail Dive — www.retaildive.com

The long march to mobile continues:

While 36% of the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomer shoppers plan to shop online via their personal computers, 22% of Gen X shoppers will shop via their personal computers, and 21% of millennials and Gen Z consumers will do the same. Eighteen percent of Gen X shoppers will shop on their mobile phones, and 22% of millennials and 19% of Gen Z consumers will do the same.

And as we have discussed before, offline retail is far from dead. But mediocre retail is wearing a DNR bracelet.

But the in-store shopping experience isn’t dead among younger shoppers. PwC’s research also found that 60% of young shoppers will go out of their way for a superior shopping experience.

Just For Fun

Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged — The New York Times — www.nytimes.com

After stripping identifying information, the government provided the researchers with a data set including 2.7 million business founders. The researchers calculated that the founders’ average age was 42. And for the founders of the 0.1 percent fastest-growing firms, the average age was 45. Firms that were successful enough to have an initial public offering or be acquired by a larger company showed the same pattern: Their founders were generally middle-aged.

Netflix ships milestone 5 billionth disc — CNET — www.cnet.com

Netflix still ships a million discs each week. 🤯