Points.com’s Vice President of Product, Sean Hutchison, recently presented a webinar titled, “Expanding Your Program’s Reach in the Complex World of E-Commerce.” Attendees were granted privileged access to insights into a number of online commerce issues trending now, including social commerce and virtual currencies. In addition, Sean covered the traditional role loyalty programs play in the ecommerce marketplace, and talked about industry players that are shaping loyalty in online commerce today.
The webinar was packed with information, and provided a comprehensive look at the online marketplace; a full course in e-commerce in just one short hour. This is the future of commerce and if you’re not there already, marketers need to be prepared to get in the game quickly. Sean reported that “online sales are expected to grow $100 billion from 2010 to 2015,” and shared that “e-commerce is growing at five times traditional retail with online sales expected to overtake traditional sales in less than ten years.” Marketers need this information now, to prepare for this shift.
Defining the multiple components in the e-commerce marketplace, Sean provided several examples and numerous statistics on what is trending now. A snapshot of some of the details covered includes:
Social Commerce: With a growing “50,000 stores up and running on Facebook,” Sean shared several social commerce success stories.
Virtual Currencies: Sean also reported that: “Virtual commerce is a $2.2 billion industry today and is expected to grow to $6 billion in less than 5 years,” offering insights to marketers for getting into the virtual commerce game. He discussed, in detail, the major players in the space today.
Loyalty Program Opportunities: With what Sean covers as a, “massive convergence in e-commerce with major players beginning to emerge” what does this mean for the loyalty industry? Sean provides best practice advice for loyalty programs to address the opportunity that the evolving world of online commerce offers. Some tips included: Offering redemption into virtual currencies and working with e-commerce payment providers to drive earn behavior.
In a recent interview with Loyalty 360 Sean discussed the future of ecommerce, “I’m excited about what’s happening in payment and ecommerce platforms. Companies like Paypal, Magento and Shopify are making great strides in how merchants and consumers interact online. We’re now seeing platforms, payment, and processing all merge under big brands like Visa, Google, and PayPal and it will be interesting to see which organizations will emerge as ecommerce leaders in the next few years.”
Providing a history, current status and future predictions for the e-commerce world, this was truly a must-see event for all marketers. Loyalty 360 encourages you to listen to the full webinar. If you missed it, or want to view it again and capture all of this great information, for a limited time, Loyalty 360 will be offering full playback of the Points.com webinar “Expanding Your Program’s Reach in the Complex World of E-Commerce” at Loyalty360.org.
Interested in hearing more from Sean Hutchison? In a recent interview with Loyalty 360 Sean shared his perspective on current industry trends. MEET THE SPEAKER: Interview with Sean Hutchison, Vice President of Product at Points.com