Full Metal Niche (eCom 2022)
Between 2019 and 2020, the e-commerce industry grew by 44%. This giant leap was unforeseen, as it has in many other sectors, as an effect of the pandemic containment measures.
As a result, the expectation of seeing a growth trend in features like voice commerce or other features typical of advanced users has collapsed. 2021 has been a year of hard retail, back to basics, with features essential to ensure we can deliver everything (or almost everything) ordered with a good level of service.
With so much user growth last year, retailers of all sizes will challenge to find niches of interest and increase profitability. Nothing is more critical today than responding to the individual needs of small communities, often isolated by choice or by force from Main Street.
Mobile and personalization are macro trends that have been going on for a long time and will not stop accompanying us. Intelligent and straightforward actions to be taken in the first 12 weeks of the year to guarantee a base in the next 12 months.
Big Retailers
Large single-brand, often multi-product retailers with more than $100 million in e-commerce revenue per year face one challenge. They are finding niches. To do so, they must open themselves up to Dropshipping.
This way of selling ensures that suddenly you create dozens, hundreds, or thousands of stores that can offer your products to communities that you would probably never have reached if not with massive advertising.
After analyzing the proper pricing, it's the move to make, along with an evaluation of the eco-footprint and better communication on the environmental sustainability of their eCommerce solution.
Medium Retailers
What we see in this area is the need to fix the basics again. There's a need to get the IT and logistics departments and customer service involved more and more, creating real micro-teams that can make a solid backbone. Medium-sized retailers, those who travel around $15-20 million a year in e-commerce sales, will be challenged to work on their consistency.
The abandonment of traditional systems and the opening of more straightforward and more standard forms of e-commerce (PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Wix) will be evaluations that the media will make in 2022.
Small retailers
Tiny retailers have to work on their catalogs. Considering that the big ones will open up more and more to Dropshipping, there will be many opportunities to evaluate new product insertions.
However, be careful, for the little ones time is short. Even just changing the notification emails or reviewing the payment process can take a lot of time in family or near-family businesses. In small companies of 4 or 5 workers, there are many choices and the possibility of making mistakes very little, another reason to work with niche products, virtual warehouses, exclusively external tools, and not develop proprietary ones.
The call to go full niche
In 2022 it will be preferable to create sales by positioning yourself as a specialist in small online communities. That implies the development of a vertical catalog, a potentially limited number of products, simpler Buying Personas, repetitive and optimizable advertising mechanisms. You may have noticed that we have insisted on order and repetition throughout the document. The year 2022 asks us to do better than what we know today to do "only" well.
"Better" shortly also means less risk. So forget endless catalogs, especially if you own the stock of the goods you sell. Spend (more) time getting to know (fewer) customers. Invest in SEM and Social Ads with direct creativity that speaks only to those with the undivided interest you want to satisfy.
Download the full 2022Trends report here.