White Paper

12 E-Commerce Growth Strategies for 2024

Follow this growth game plan and your business will be on the road to future success.
Content

What does every great sports coach do before the new season starts? They meticulously map out their game plan – considering how to leverage the team’s current strengths, and where the team needs to scale and grow – and they’re not afraid to make mid-season adjustments. A successful e-commerce business is no different.

Growth should be the number one priority for any company with a viable business model, but this is especially true of the e-commerce industry – it’s a booming market, and there’s a huge amount of potential profit floating about for those who ride the wave in the right way. In this white paper, we outline 12 growth strategies that will help your e-commerce business scale for success in 2022.
Batters up! It’s playtime.

The Status Quo of E-Commerce Growth

How exactly is e-commerce booming, you ask? Let us count the ways:

Studies project that in 2024 revenue in the e-commerce Market will reach US$3,647.00bn, showing an annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of 9.83%.

At $1.137 trillion, US online sales grew by grew by 9.3% in 2024.

Nasdaq predicts that by 2040, 95% of purchases will be facilitated by e-commerce in the UK.

China’s e-commerce market was set to hit $3 trillion US dollars by 2023, according to Global Data.

Gartner predicted that the total number of B2B digital commerce transactions would overtake the number of B2B direct sales transactions by the end of 2023.

These numbers highlight that e-commerce is indeed booming, and that it’s happening on a global playing field. Digitization is no longer purely a B2C game. B2B is increasingly getting in on the action – and experiencing huge returns.

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the industry by a decade in just 3 months, what McKinsey coined “the quickening”. This means e-commerce businesses, no matter their field, must be willing to adapt quickly and embrace new technologies if they want to stay competitive.

In this white paper, we cover 12 growth strategies that will help your business innovate, penetrate new markets, test and adopt new business models, and ultimately, leverage available and ever-evolving e-commerce technologies.

Strategy #1

Marketplace Mastery

With $2.67 Trillion Marketplace sales currently account for 62% of the global online retail sales. In 2020 alone, about $2.67 trillion was spent on the world’s top 100 marketplaces. Mastering a marketplace is a proven way of effectively scaling an e-commerce business, so if it’s not part of your 2024 growth strategy, pay attention.

 

What do we mean by a marketplace?

A marketplace is a platform where sellers and buyers join forces to buy and sell products. Amazon was one of the original marketplace platforms, and continues to dominate the space today – but don’t let that put you off. There is still plenty of room to make a profit in the platform economy, especially for niche businesses in both the B2B and B2C sectors.

Gartner predicted this shift towards marketplace, anticipating 15% of medium-to high-gross-merchandise-value digital commerce organizations to deploy their marketplaces in 2023, thereby creating an entirely new digital ecosystem – and your business could be one of them. For businesses with an existing traditional e-commerce platform, a digital marketplace could be the next growth step towards accelerating customer acquisition and increasing revenue.

 

Starting a marketplace for growth

One major advantage of the marketplace model is that you can offer your customers a much larger product offering, without taking on the inventory risk – a win-win for all stakeholders involved. A broad product portfolio and higher inventory levels equate to easier discovery by customers, which in turn leads to sales.

Many B2B and B2C businesses worry about the competitive nature of enterprise marketplaces. However, they fail to consider the benefits they could lose out on if they disregard a marketplace as a future growth opportunity.

Quickfire benefits of a marketplace
  • Effortless scale: increase product assortment at a low cost
  • Increased profit margins: new revenue streams and commission on sales equal increased profit
  • Diversify your offerings: test and adapt products with new merchants based on customer behavior
  • Improve SEO and increase traffic: More merchants and more products equal more website traffic
  • Go 24/7: Local merchants in different time zones facilitate internationalization and a 24/7 business.
  • Work with merchants on strategy: Rely on your merchants’ expertise so you can focus on which strategies result in the highest profit.
  • Foster customer loyalty: Become the one-stop-shop for your customers with a broad offering, increasing retention.
  • Ownership: Control which merchants you work with and what permissions they have.
Strategy #2

Get a Head(less) Start

Forbes said it best: “Aristotle said the human body is at its best at age 30. The same can now be said for e-commerce, which turned 30 this year. The best way to celebrate this milestone is with a new headless architecture.”

 

But what exactly does ‘go headless’ mean?

In essence, headless means a front and back-end which function independently and are ‘de-coupled’. This allows companies to be more agile and adaptable, and tailor their front-end with evolving customer demands. Most traditional e-commerce systems are monolithic, where the front and backend systems are inextricably linked, and have very little room for flexibility. This is a challenge for businesses that want a more personalized and flexible user experience.

Going headless means it’s easier to connect various sales channels such as mobile, social, wearables, voice assistants, and more. We discuss some of these newer revenue streams in detail later on, but for now, just understand that a headless architecture is a crucial growth strategy for 2024 if your business goals include quickly adapting to evolving market and customer demands.

 

“By 2023 prices for B2C digital commerce platforms will be 30% less than 2019, due to feature commoditization and “headless” implementations.“

– 2021 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce”, Gartner, 31 August 2021

Quickfire benefits of Headless

  • Flexibility: Customize your storefront(s) however you like without impacting the back-end.
  • Customization & Personalization: Create custom user experiences and refine them along the way.
  • Time to Market: Easier expansion and integration result in faster implementation, i.e. a much shorter time frame to release a new market-ready product.
  • Omnichannel experience: Multiple touchpoints facilitate a seamless customer journey
Strategy #3

Sell Direct to-Consumer (D2C)

Often thought of as a purely B2C growth strategy, the B2B world is now also embracing D2C as a potential lucrative sales channel as part of an overall growth strategy. D2C is projected to grow by almost 20% this year, while data from 2019 suggests that 57% of consumer brand manufacturers were already embracing Direct-to-consumer.

In the past, simply relying on offline wholesalers wasn’t a huge problem. But in the online world, you have monopolies and oligopolies who will treat your business like an exchangeable logistics company. All it takes is one competitor to do it faster or cheaper than you, and you’re left out in the cold.

Fear galvanizes change, and there’s nothing scarier than suddenly losing access to your customers. That’s why many B2B businesses are now getting into the D2C game, selling straight to customers online.

For manufacturers, going D2C can feel intimidating, especially if digitization is greenfield territory. However, it’s worth remembering that most manufacturers already implement D2C offline. What’s more, your customers now expect to be able to go directly to your online platform to find your complete range of products and the most detailed, valid information. Digitization means that they no longer need to go to retailers to ask for advice, but can instead come directly to the source for information – the manufacturers producing the products.

If your business doesn’t already do online D2C sales, then it’s time to consider this channel as part of your 2024 growth strategy.

Quickfire benefits of going D2C
  • Own the customer experience: Be in the driver’s seat of your own brand voice, create more customer touchpoints, and improve personalization.
  • Diversify & digitize stock management: Create more revenue streams with a wider variety of stock, guarantee stock for your customers, and control pricing.
  • Own your data: Get access to a wealth of data about your customers, helping you to personalize and tailor their user experience for increased retention.
  • Speed: Go to market quickly with no middle man; test and learn new products, services, or markets with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach.
  • Agility and fast tracked Innovation: Adapt fast, scale efficiently, and retain the flexibility to adopt new technologies.
Strategy #4

Call the Shots With Cloud

If your e-commerce business is not already using cloud or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology, then it’s time to consider upgrading as part of your 2024 growth strategy.

The future of e-commerce is all about composability – being able to quickly implement new changes to your business model based on rapidly changing customer demands. This is much more attainable when you host your business with a cloud solution, rather than on-premise.

With a PaaS solution, you can develop, run and manage your e-commerce business without the complexity of building, scaling, or maintaining onpremise infrastructure. With cloud solutions, you are able to quickly deploy new updates, patches, and security features – and also scale as you desire.

 

“By 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.“

– 2021 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce”, Gartner, 31 August 2021

Quickfire benefits of Cloud/PaaS
  • Highly customizable: Allowing you to change and evolve to meet new customer demands, and innovate when you want to.
  • Quick to scale: Benefit from shorter test cycles and efficient development.
  • Lower costs: Lean system means a lower total cost of ownership
  • Increased digitization: Full control on the application level while solving complex business needs.
  • Speed: 40% of online shoppers will abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Cloud solutions are designed to improve loading speed, leading to increased sales from frustrated customers.
Strategy #5

Go Global

Borders are becoming increasingly meaningless when it comes to e-commerce. For example, a customer sitting in Europe can order an item from China, or vice versa, and pick the best deal from multiple international sellers. While this creates increased competition (especially with low manufacturing costs in developing countries), it also opens up the possibility for a much larger customer base.

Forrester predicted that cross-border purchases made up 20% of all e-commerce trade by 2022, illustrating that internationalization is a hot ticket on the agenda for many businesses. So, if you’ve got a viable business model in your home market, in 2024 you should consider expanding to new countries as part of your growth strategy.

Of course, it’s important to consider how the market might be different in another country, but internationalization remains a key and very important strategy for success. When choosing an e-commerce software provider, opt for one with a multi-store capability. This allows you to create a single store with one product database that can serve multiple regions or languages, or separate regional stores with localized product offerings.

43% of sellers report that managing customers’ delivery expectations is a big issue when going international, so it’s important to consider your logistics infrastructure before launching any large internationalization projects.

Consider internationalizing through an enterprise marketplace. It’s an effective way to test your products in different markets without a huge investment, before fully going to market.

Quickfire benefits of internationalization
  • Lower & more predictable costs: More cost-effective than fully launching into a new market with no previous knowledge.
  • Increased reach: Tapping into your merchant’s customer base, means lower customer acquisition costs for you
  • Test new markets easily: Dip into desired new markets before committing to a full go-to market plan.
  • Fast feedback: Gather data and insights from customer behavior with a test and learn mentality.
  • Low entry barrier: Easy technical implementation means lower IT investment at the MVP stage.
Strategy #6

Expand Your Brand

Consider expanding your brand offerings as part of your 2024 growth strategy. Enterprises should consider brand expansion for a number of reasons, such as target new customer bases or taking advantage of niche offerings.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re a swimming pool provider operating a B2B e-commerce system mainly targeting hotels and property managers. Your business already has access to the inventory it needs to create a D2C sister brand, targeting homeowners who want swimming pools directly. However, this would require different messaging and a totally different user experience on your storefront.

Similarly to internationalization, it’s important to work with an e-commerce system that utilizes multi-store features. This helps you to easily manage multiple storefronts with distinct brand positioning from the same core product assortment. You can then customize these separate storefronts depending on your customer or market needs. For example, provide specialized discounts, or enable a completely different store logic and navigation experience.

More about multi-store features
Quickfire benefits of Brand expansion
  • Customer diversification: Reach a wider customer base without worrying about additional inventory.
  • Advertising opportunities: Expand your network of advertisers to suit your new brand identities, helping you reach new customers.
  • Potential for platform economy: Utilize marketplace technology to take advantage of other merchants’ product offerings to help expand your brands.
  • Easy tech implementation: As long as your e-commerce platform provider has a multi-store feature, it’s quick and easy to create and test new brands.
Strategy #7

Going to the Other Side

One of the most effective growth strategies in e-commerce is launching an entirely new business model. If you are a B2C company, is there a way you could initiate a B2B model? If you are B2B, is there room and potential for a B2C revenue stream?

Many B2C businesses are reticent to dip into B2B and vice versa, but there are huge potential gains to be made. Take the B2B marketplace space for instance – Digital Commerce 360 predicts that sales in this market could reach up to $3.6 trillion by 2024. While marketing, sales, and value propositions will change, it’s a common misconception that the two business models have nothing in common, when in fact they share many similarities.

Both models require you to sell to a human, yes, even in B2B. Ultimately, there is always a person experiencing challenges, fears and doubts making the purchasing decision. Relationship building is important for both models, whether that’s forging direct one-on-one relationships with potential B2B buyers, or building a social community for your B2C business. Listening to customers and their pain points is vital for both business models.

Last, but certainly not least, digital is an important sales channel for both B2C and B2B, where data about customer behavior can be used to personalize experiences and keep up with increasingly complex customer demands.

Quickfire benefits of New business models
  • Inventory: You already have your stock management in place so it’s just a case of setting up new logistics channels to serve your new customer base.
  • Huge market potential: Especially for B2C companies dipping into B2B, the digital market is wide open for new leaders to take the top spots.
  • Unified Commerce: By adopting a unified commerce approach, you can run both sales channels out of the same system, reducing technical overhead, unifying catalog management, and streamlining branding.
Strategy #8

Turn on Auto-Pilot

Automation is not only changing the face of e-commerce, but the entire world we live in. In a not-so-distant future where empty fridges automatically order missing grocery items, cars drive themselves, and store clerks are replaced by AI, it’s important to consider how technological advances will impact the e-commerce industry.

In a previous forecast, Gartner predicted that e-commerce platforms using AI will achieve an improvement of at least 25% in customer satisfaction by 2023, with increased revenues and cost reductions. Globally...

 

... AI’s market value is predicted to reach $126 billion by 2025.

Take the time to consider how to leverage automation for your business as an effective growth strategy in 2024.

Why is automation so important? Simply put, it will save your business time and money. A higher level of automation equals lower overhead, increased efficiency, and lower production and logistics costs.

Quickfire benefits of Automation
  • Warehouse automation: The global warehouse automation market is predicted to increase from $15 billion in 2019 to $30 billion by 2026. Businesses utilizing automated solutions in their warehouses record double-digit improvements due to overall increased efficiency and productivity.
  • Automated order fulfilment: Manage inventory, crossborder logistics, drop-shipping, and fast delivery windows, removing as much human error as possible. Taking note that 45% of online shoppers are unlikely to purchase from a store again after having received an item late.
  • Diverse touchpoints: Voice shopping, wearables, VR - new technology is being developed all the time which both utilize AI and increase the potential customer touchpoints available. Voice shopping alone was set to reach $40 billion by 2022, illustrating the demand and growth potential.
  • AI customer service: Intelligent chat-bots mean round-the-clock customer service. Important, considering that 90% of customers prefer to shop where companies are able to answer inquiries immediately, and 48% of consumers prefer live chat over any other method of contact.
  • Personalization: Reports show that 10-30% of all e-commerce purchases are due to recommendations. AI helps to generate product recommendations, not only using purchase history data, but also insights from similar customers’ buying behavior. Customers say they are more than twice as likely to add items to the basket and 40% more likely to spend more than planned when experiences are highly personalized.
  • PIM automation: Displaying accurate product information is vital for your customers, but can also be very time-consuming. An automated PIM system easily solves this pain point.
  • Automate returns process: A smooth and fast return process is hugely important for today’s consumers, and helps with all-important customer retention.
Strategy #9

Set the Pace With New Streams

We’ve covered expanding into new markets, new channels, and with new brands. But let’s not forget another important and lucrative growth strategy: new revenue streams. That is – new ways of making a profit within your existing business infrastructure.

Examples of new revenue streams for e-commerce companies include:

  • Affiliate marketing: Essentially, one business driving referrals to another, where you earn profit from a commission on every successful sale.
  • Data: Information is extremely valuable, and your business can turn a profit on customer data by working with companies specializing in targeted advertising, personalized services, or medical research. Just don’t forget to ensure that you adhere to the data privacy laws applicable in each region.
  • Featured listings: Especially relevant if your business runs a marketplace model, merchants pay extra to have their items come up first on your platform – a sort of ‘boost’ system.
  • Subscriptions: Consider charging your customers a fee to be able to use your platform. While this can alienate some customers, it can also foster a feeling of exclusivity and activate that all-important ‘fear of missing out.
  • Advertising: If you have a large customer base, other businesses will happily pay you to reach them. This often works best with complementary products or services, creating the potential to cross or up-sell.
Quickfire benefits of New revenue streams
  • Low implementation costs: Generally speaking, new revenue streams often capitalize on existing infrastructure meaning that they are low-cost and easy to implement.
  • Low hanging fruit: Quite the opposite of a large new sales channel which might require additional overhead and expertise, these kinds of new revenue streams are quick wins by nature, and shouldn’t require extensive hiring to see them through.
  • Diversification: In this rapidly changing e-commerce environment, it’s wise to create a diverse spread of revenue streams so that your entire profit isn’t dependent on one strategy, which leaves you wide open to the risk of market downturns, changing customer demands, or technological advancements, for instance.
Strategy #10

Go Live & Stay Social

While some business models were decimated due to the pandemic, others have soared above and beyond expectations. One such industry is social media. There are now more than 4.5 billion social media users around the world, growing almost 10% in a year, and TikTok just hit the 1 billion user milestone. Billions of users equal billions of potential customers, so it’s no surprise that social commerce is growing into a giant industry – and a key growth strategy for e-commerce in 2024 and beyond.

US social commerce sales are expected to grow 35% in 2021, surpassing $36 billion, while China’s retail social commerce sales are predicted to hit $351.65 billion. Whether it’s via Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Whatsapp, Wechat, or more, social media platforms are generating new ways to reach customers every day, and analysts predict that it’s going to account for a huge chunk of e-commerce sales in the future.

One exciting revenue stream opportunity within the social space is live shopping. China is leading the way, with two-thirds of Chinese consumers reporting that they had bought products via lifestream in the last year. Meanwhile, 2020’s Single’s Day presales campaign on Taobao Live generated $7.5 billion for Alibaba in the first 30 minutes alone. McKinsey predicts that if we take China as the leading example, live shopping sales could account for as much as 10-20% of all e-commerce by 2026.

What’s more, social commerce isn’t purely a B2C growth strategy. 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives reported using social media to support purchase decisions. While the impulse buying tactics of live shopping might be less relevant for the B2B space, social commerce as a tool to inform, educate, and ultimately lead a buyer to purchase is absolutely viable and effective for the B2B space.

What exactly is social commerce? Social commerce is the method of promoting and selling goods or services directly via social networking platforms. It includes practices such as offering promotions, creating viral video content, recommendations or endorsements via influencers.

What exactly is live shopping? Live shopping combines the sale of a featured product with instant audience participation through chat or reaction functionality through internet live streaming. A reported 70% of Europeans are open to live shopping, however, it’s still a relatively small market compared to China, which means that there is a huge opportunity for businesses willing to invest in this growth strategy.

Interested in the growth of live shopping and social commerce in China and beyond? Watch our episode of Spryker OnAir with Kai Ding, an e-commerce expert in China.

Watch Now
Quickfire benefits of Social commerce
  • Customer engagement: Interacting directly with your customers via social media builds trust, awareness, and authenticity of your brand.
  • Accelerated audience growth & conversion: McKinsey reports that companies report conversion rates in social commerce as approaching 30 percent—up to ten times higher than in conventional e-commerce. Limited time promotions generate a sense of urgency in buyers, pushing them quickly through the funnel from awareness to purchase.
  • Brand appeal: Something like live shopping illustrates differentiation in a saturated market, and shows customers that you’re brave enough to try something new.
  • Customer insights: Most social platforms have in-built analytics tools measuring impressions and reach, garnering more data about your customer base which can be used to improve personalization and targeting.
  • Higher order values: By making shopping quick and easy where a buyer can view something they like on social media and immediately purchase it, cart values increase.
  • Improved SEO: Social commerce accelerates organic traffic to your website as you target users with relevant content, which in turn improves your digital rankings.
Strategy #11

Build a Community

Building on the idea of social commerce, consider community building as a potential growth strategy for your business in 2024. How does building a community help your business to scale? Nielsen reports that 92% of global consumers trust recommendations from friends and family above other forms of advertising. As such, community building can lead to increased customer acquisition and retention, as community members interact, share reviews, and offer instant feedback.

There are a couple of core ideas that are essential for successful community building:

  1. understand your audience
  2. provide value with the content you offer, and
  3. engage and inspire organic growth with human interaction.
Quickfire benefits of a Community
  • Low cost: It can be extremely cost-efficient to start building a community. A social platform such as Facebook is free. Do your research about what forums your target audience uses and start communicating with them there - for free.
  • Feedback: Communities offer instant and free feedback. This means that you can test products, ideas, and messaging on your loyal community before rolling it out to your larger customer base.
  • Brand: Consumers love a brand with personality, where it’s clear that real humans work there. Think about some of the most popular Twitter accounts, such as Wendy’s with nearly 4 million followers. When customers reach out and receive a human response, they feel more connected to the brand
  • Site traffic: Engaged community members who interact with your content will be more likely to visit your e-commerce site and make a purchase.
Strategy #12

Disrupt Yourself

Ready for the most exciting growth strategy for 2024? Disrupt your own business model as a way to scale. We know it sounds crazy, but hear us out!

One of Spryker’s customers, Wrist Ship Supply, recently did this very thing. They are by far the market leader in their industry. They decided that in order to defend this position, they needed to actually disrupt and challenge their business – from the inside. They’re currently building a new venture designed to innovate and find new ways to remove friction points between buyers and sellers in the industry with a brand new B2B marketplace.

“It’s both a defensive and offensive move, because if we don’t do it, someone else will.” commented Michael Mørk, Director of Digital Transformation at Wrist Ship Supply when talking about how the company is disrupting themselves at Spryker EXCITE 2021.

How to disrupt yourself:

  • Innovate at the edge: Don’t go mad – there’s no reason to destroy your core business, as long as it’s working. Instead, focus on opportunities at the periphery, where you can test out-of-the-box products or services
  • Hire a shadow team: Quite the opposite of a large new sales channel which might require additional overhead and expertise, these kinds of new revenue streams are quick wins by nature, and shouldn’t require extensive hiring to see them through.
  • Consider an acceleration lab: If Google does it, it can hardly be a bad idea. They have an internal program where they work with partners and hackers to try to innovate from the inside.

To learn more about how Wrist are disrupting themselves, you can watch the full keynote speech.

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Quickfire benefits of Disruption
  • Stay competitive: If you’re not willing to disrupt yourself, your competition will. Embracing this attitude will help your business to stay competitive and not be blind-sighted by a younger, more technologically savvy start-up.
  • Existing infrastructure : Benefit from your existing customer base, logistics set-up, or partner program. This way, your project isn’t completely greenfield and will be much faster and leaner to get going.
  • Profit: Our customer, Wrist Ship Supply, is predicting benefits of 3-5 percentage points from their disruption plans.

Conclusion

Growth is scary, after all, they don’t call them ‘growing pains’ for no reason. But just like sticking to the status quo will stymie development and success, fear of change can cripple a business in a rapidly evolving industry.

Successful sports coaches aren’t afraid of change and growth – in fact, they embrace it. Whether that’s recruiting new talent, trying new formations, or bringing in outside expertise. Try to channel your inner sports coach when considering business growth for 2024. As for the outside expertise, Spryker can help your business stay agile, and scale for success.

Whichever growth strategy you’re considering, Spryker and our extensive network of solution and technology partners can help your business to reach your next home run

Interested?

Check out how we’re helping our customer Jungheinrich, a B2B manufacturing company and global leader in intralogistics, grow their business. Read their story

About Spryker

Spryker is the leading global composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models to enable growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed specifically for sophisticated transactional businesses, Spryker’s easy-to-use, headless, API-first model offers a best-of-breed approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value throughout their digital transformation journey. As a global platform leader for B2B and B2C Enterprise Marketplaces, IoT Commerce, and Unified Commerce, Spryker has empowered 150+ global enterprise customers worldwide and is trusted by brands such as ALDI, Siemens, ZF Friedrichshafen, and Ricoh. Spryker is a privately held technology company headquartered in Berlin and New York backed by world class investors such as TCV, One Peak, Project A, Cherry Ventures, and Maverick Capital. Learn more at spryker.com.

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