A Starter Kit: E-Commerce Platforms, Payment and Parcel Delivery!
By: Kemal Sidar
Tags: Amazon, Retail, Sales, Ecommerce, Marketing

A Starter Kit: E-Commerce Platforms, Payment and Parcel Delivery!

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

1. E-COMMERCE PLATFORMS AND ONLINE MARKETPLACES

Every year, Internet Retailing publishes a list of best-performing online shops in the UK under the name UK RetailX Top500. According to this list, the retailers in the UK that have performed at an “exceptional level” are Amazon, Argos, Dunelm, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Next.

Among e-commerce platforms, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento Enterprise are found to be the most popular platforms used by the online shops in the RetailX Top 500 list. These two platforms are preferred by 16% and 14.6% of the leading online retailers in the UK, respectively. Other popular e-commerce platforms are Amplience (9.4%), Hybris (9.4%), IBM Websphere Commerce (9.2%), Oracle Commerce (6.2%) and Magento (6%).

A recent report from Edge by Ascential demonstrates that Amazon dominated the e-commerce market in the UK by accounting for $30bn in sales in 2019. eBay comes second on the list with $9.8bn, followed by Sainsbury’s ($4.6bn), Tesco ($4.5) and Walmart ($3.9).

2. PAYMENT METHODS

The use of mobile payment methods in e-commerce has become more and more widespread over the years. 24% of 2,000 people surveyed during the Mintel Consumer Payment Preferences Reports declared that they used mobile payments in 2018. This demonstrates a 50% increase from the ratio of 16% in 2017.

Worldpay’s Retail Global Payments Report 2019 also demonstrates that eWallets such as PayPal and Visa Checkout have reached 25% of e-commerce payments in the UK (see figure below). Debit and credit cards are still the most commonly used payment methods in e-commerce, but alternatives like eWallets are increasingly preferred by online shoppers in the UK.

A similar result is presented in the J.P.Morgan 2019 Payments Trends Report. It suggests that when it comes to online purchases, cards continue to be the primary payment method in the UK as well as across the majority of the European countries. Card use is particularly common in wealthy, digitally advanced countries with high bank penetration.

J.P.Morgan’s report shows that the highest card payments are in Denmark (63.4% of e-commerce payments), Ireland (60%) and the UK (53%) where digital wallets became as a key payment option for e-commerce transactions.

The figure below presents preferred payment methods for online purchases in 2017 and 2018.

3. PARCEL DELIVERY COMPANIES

According to a survey conducted in 2019, 52.7% of the correspondents say that they prefer the Royal Mail as their parcel delivery company. Although it is popular among consumers, Royal Mail was listed only as the second most common delivery option by retailers in the UK. Hermes Group came up to be the most preferred parcel delivery company among retailers.

On the other hand, there is another list of the top 30 logistics and service providers in the UK, which was compiled by The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT). This list was created by assessing financials, performance, accreditation, the gender pay gap and human resource factors. The top 10 UK logistics service providers according to this list are different from the ones presented above.

1: DPD Group

2: DHL Supply Chain

3: UPS

4: Wincanton

5: Kuehne + Nagel

6: Hermes

7: Bulkhaul

8: Turners

9: Brenntag UK & Ireland

10: XPO Supply Chain UK

An alternative perspective on the preferred delivery company is the results of the most recent (2020) annual poll conducted by MoneySavingExpert.com. MoneySavingExpert.com is the UK’s biggest consumer website, with about 16 million users a month.

In 2020, DPD preserves its ranking and shares first place with CollectPlus, which has climbed from the 5th place in 2019. Royal Mail comes third in the ranking. DPD has continuously been selected as the top parcel delivery firm for the last seven years in the annual poll of MoneySavingExpert.com users.

This ranking is created based on the percentage of ‘great’ and ‘OK’ votes these firms get (by earning two points per ‘great’ percentage point and one point per ‘OK’ percentage point) from participants.