12 E-Commerce Growth Strategies for 2024

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.