Ecom’s boom meets reality check: Focus on CX, efficiency and making money kicks-in hard as Amazon ramps up, puts pure-plays under existential pressure

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Ecom’s runaway train has hit the buffers. Now brands must sweat massive investments made over Covid much harder, grappling simultaneously with how to drive profitable growth without harming customer experience. Expect a wholesale to push into loyalty and retail media, per Accenture Song MD and ANZ Commerce Lead Peter Davias.
Meanwhile, he thinks Amazon may finally present the threat that everyone feared a decade ago, with headwinds for Kogan and Catch potential auguries. Which means more aggressive competition is coming for everyone, just as consumers are tightening their belts, necessitating a laser-like focus on efficiency and de-risking fulfilment supply chains while fuelling a shift to cost-saving ‘headless’ tech stacks.

L'Oréal has piled into ecom, launching nine direct-to-consumer sites since 2019. After that surge, the focus is squarely on “sustainable, profitable growth”, per Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, Georgia Hack, while using its new CDP to dive into “personalisation at scale” and push harder into social commerce to plot new growth.

News Corp Australia is aiming for a slice of that action by priming consumers with content-driven headless commerce – which allows stores to effectively set up a store within its pages – and affiliate links, per News Corp Australia eCommerce Director, Adam Kron.

Meanwhile Accenture Song’s Managing Director and Technology Lead, Josh Lamont, says the convergence of marketing, customer, digital and commerce functions is what’s driving both the rise of the Chief Customer Officer and the push by the big commerce technology platform players to move end-to-end, including into marketing. He thinks consulting firms will need to similarly converge marketing, sales, service, ecom and digital product teams – a step Accenture Song is now taking.

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