We recently sponsored a webinar on e-commerce content management where Brian Walker of Forrester Research delivered some interesting insights into consumer demands and how this demand puts pressure on merchant strategies to deliver content across the multi-channel shopping environment.

In this webinar we learned that consumers are not only shopping across channels but are using more and more devices to do so, even in-store.  Consumer interest in self-service devices such as scanners attached to a shopping cart, self check-out aisles, and in-store kiosks for coupons or accessing the company’s website was surprisingly high at 64%, 61%,  54% and 44% respectively.

Delivering e-commerce content consistently and effectively to all channels presents both technical and organization challenges to merchants.  Brian delivered some valuable insight and recommendations to help businesses develop strategies to organize, deliver and leverage content across all their channels.

Another challenge that struck me as equally difficult as delivering content is, what will that content be?  Your content isn’t just for selling on-line anymore, it has to service all channels and all customers with different goals and needs. 

• From a shopper’s point of view, content needs to provide me with the value I’m looking for, when and where I’m looking for it and it better be easy and relevant. 
• The brick-and-mortar retailers know that much of their forecasting, planning, purchasing, pricing, distributions, and marketing strategies are all aimed at satisfying those customers demands.  Unfortunately some of the contributing factors in their analysis are specific to the physical location such as geographic differences in culture, climate, ethnicity, store or mall type, local demographics, etc.  They’ve developed valuable strategies, but how do you apply those to an on-line world without those physical boundaries and provide content that is still relevant to everyone? 
• E-commerce teams have amassed significant knowledge and strategies dealing in the online world where an abundance of products, competitors and content are available to relatively anonymous shoppers.  But if the goal is to provide a seamless experience to shoppers across channels and if a significant percentage of that online experience is affecting offline purchases, how do you merge online strategies with off-line buying processes?

Both creation of content and delivery of content to all channels are challenges that will require new levels of input and co-ordination across businesses. 

To learn more about Brian's analysis and recommendations on delivering e-commerce content across all your channels, you can watch the full Evolution of E-commerce Content Management here.