Costco outperforming pure players in the E commerce competition

Costco is really a fascinating company...

The Internet Retailer Top 500 E-commerce sites ranking has been released. The purpose of this ranking is to study which are the best performing e-merchant websites.


For this study, Dynatrace aggregates scores on four subcategories to create an overall score. Each retailer’s ranking in each subcategory is also reported in the index. Here are the four subcategories:

• Mobile: tests pulling up the mobile page across mobile carriers, 
• Last Mile: test running from real end-user machines running in homes and businesses across the U.S. 
• Web: test hitting the home pages of each retailer from network nodes
• Transactions: tests which search for a product, add it to a cart and checkout. 

 Each ranking is created by examining:
 1) Response Time: how fast to execute that transaction.
 2) Availability: how successful were we at executing the tests.
 3) Consistency: how much variability there was in the results.

What has made the headlines is the fact that Costco has been ranked n°11 of this website. Even though Costco has been pushing its online strategy, Costco is a hard core retailer focusing on operational executions to deliver sales growth. But what is interesting on this ranking is to notice how much operational execution is key to online success. Hence, Costco, by having an efficient e-commerce website, is able to maximize customer experience (even by proposing a minimal one), and therefore to out perform some other pure players, that we might have expected to be above Costco. Moreover, Costco out performs Apple!

Efficient operational execution remains key in retailing, no matter where.

Customer Decision Making Process: What information drives consumers' online buying decisions?

Interesting blogpost I found from Forrester's website. This Christmas season is obviously crucial for most retailers results. The shopping frenzy makes it one of the busiest time of the year for retailers. More and more, customers tend to shop online instead than in malls and stores. But what information drives customer to shop online. What are the key information that will trigger the sales for e-retailers. Here is an interesting chart: 

What is interesting, is how there key aspects of the decision making process need to be taken into consideration into the website's strategy. Hence, by advertizing clearly the information about the shipping costs, customer reviews, product information, and clear return policy, one e-retailer will limit the bargain of buying online, and hence maximize the chance the customer to buy online.

Especially, if these information are clear, it will limit the risk the shopper to go to different online stores to compare, which is a real risk in the e-commerce world.

Also, what is interesting, is to see that brick&mortar retailers, which are facing high competition of e-retailers, should actually leverage this information. Thanks to mobile technology, they are able now to provide a lot of information on product reviews, and product information on store. They also have most of the time clear return policy, which is easier as you may deposit it in the nearby store.

Very interesting stats.