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The Winter of Retailers’ Ecommerce Discontent

February 9, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Hear that sound, mobile payments platform providers? That’s knocking. On the other side of that knock is none other than opportunity, as a new report from Internet Retailer details a growing discontent in the online shopping community.

Right around half of online retailers are actually dissatisfied with their current ecommerce platform, and that means a major opportunity in the works for ecommerce platform providers.

The bad news is that a chunk of this market will be denied potential replacements outright. Seventeen percent of the retailers involved in the Internet Retailer study are already in the middle of selecting replacements, so any kind of marketing effort may run into the “it’s too late” phenomenon.

The good news, however, is that the lion’s share of this market—72 percent—plan to make the switch starting in 2019.

That’s a big new market in the making, and better yet, the study even shows what retailers are looking for in their new alternative by telling us what they don’t like about the current crop. The biggest issue is that retailers are just outgrowing current providers, which don’t seem to be keeping up the way that retailers would like.

So retailers are increasingly looking to a software-as-a-service model to help provide service at the level retailers would like to see. Plus, software-as-a-service models allow for comparatively easy upgrades that retailers are more likely to be able to handle internally.

The gauntlet has been thrown down for platform providers; can you offer a high-end system that delivers a lot of value, available on a cloud basis, with the extra tools that retailers likely want? If so, start your marketing engines now in earnest—you should have been marketing already but now’s the time to ramp it up—and brace for a sales hike.

Retailers want some powerful systems, and offering these with inclusion of things like analytics and other matter, should bump a seller to the top of a lot of retailers’ lists.

Opportunity is knocking, payment providers; now is the time to get into the fray and offer the services retailers want. Those who do should see some big gains ahead thanks to a market increasingly interested in ecommerce platforms.