May 29, 2012
One of the big highlights at this year’s ChannelAdvisor Catalyst conference in Las Vegas was the keynote speaker, Scot Wingo. Scot Wingo – ChannelAdvisor’s Founder and CEO – is well versed in the ecommerce economic sphere and is considered an industry thought leader. He regularly posts research and insight on many web publications including his own blog, ebaystrategies.blogs.com.
Some of the most interesting points of Scot’s presentation highlighted the growth of global ecommerce as well as how pivotal mobile commerce will become for companies hoping to scale their ecommerce performance.
U.S. E-commerce Adoption
Wingo’s first chart spoke loud and clear about the adoption of ecommerce in the United States. Between 2004 and 2011, adoption steadily grew from 3.5% of consumer spending to 7.6% (and as high as 8.6%). This is a pretty clear indication that ecommerce is on track to become a big portion of everyday consumer spending.
Not only was adoption rate up, but year-over-year growth was also up with pundits’ predictions at 15% y/y. Together these indicate strong growth in the ecommerce marketplace and is something to keep in mind when planning your next commercial venture.
Mobile Market Growth
The other major point we took from Scot Wingo’s talk was how important mobile ecommerce is becoming. With the advent of smartphones and tablet PCs we are beginning to see that mobile ecommerce is a very unique experience. For example, consumers are using their phones to check prices and find discounts, while tablet PC users are making purchases from the comfort of their homes, or on the go at airports and coffee shops. Mobile is proving to be a resource for price checking as well as generating an experience consumers may consider to be synonymous with an interactive magazine. It is because of these new tools and ease of use that mobile ecommerce is growing so rapidly, with projections putting mobile consumer broadband use at three to four times the personal computer broadband use by 2015.
This trend is also supported by the results we had seen earlier with the acceleration and adoption of ecommerce in the United States. If we extrapolate the current trend to reflect what pundits’ predictions are from now until 2017, we see that mobile ecommerce will prove to be a strong market to be in.
Shipwire was excited to be part of Catalyst 2012 and we look forward to going back next year. If you have any stories from Catalyst 2012 you want to share with us, feel free to do so by sending us a friendly tweet!
Or if you are interested in viewing the deck from the presentation, you can download it here.