How Are Brand Leaders Investing In Ecommerce Strategies?

94% of executives plan to maintain or increase their investment in ecommerce, and they’re targeting online listings as a spending priority.

Data is the oil that drives business decisions. In ecommerce, even more so. Brand leaders are facing numerous challenges in growth, data privacy and compliance, shipping costs, customer retention, and tech partnerships, to name a few. Amidst this puzzle, what are the key resources that help form an ecommerce brand’s strategies? 

Research by Pattern, an ecommerce acceleration firm, showed that increasing shipping costs are a top pain point (30%) for brand leaders, along with supply chain difficulties (30%) and unauthorised sellers (25%). Pattern conducted a survey of 300+ founders and ecommerce executives across dozens of product categories to publish the Ecommerce Executive Strategy Snapshot, which presents an analysis of the most common growth challenges facing brand leaders and where they plan to invest in the near future. 

The survey highlights the following questions facing ecommerce executives:

• Are my peers experiencing the same growth blockers that I’m facing?
• How does our short-term growth strategy compare to others?
• What investments am I overlooking?

Data-backed decisions have always been the right tool for ecommerce leaders, but the strategy is futile without access to good data. Pattern’s study has published its results to cover this gap. 

The most common challenges in the path to brand growth for the survey respondents were these: 

• 1 in 3 executives say rising shipping costs and an inability to maintain inventory levels are key impediments to their growth
• 1 in 4 brand leaders are struggling to get unauthorised sellers and distributors under control — eroding their sales and wreaking havoc on their growth strategy
• 1 in 4 also say an inability to expand to new channels and marketplaces is stymying their growth

Many executives are turning to outside partners to overcome these barriers.

Looking at preferred areas of investment highlighted that 94% of executives plan to maintain or increase their investment in ecommerce, and they’re targeting online listings as a spending priority.

Executives plan to increase their financial investment in ecommerce by an average of 16% over the next 6-12 months, with 25% of brand leaders reporting a planned increase of 31-98%. Just 6% of executives surveyed plan to decrease their overall financial investment during the same period. Executives cited a number of priority investment areas for the next 6-12 months:

• 58% of executives plan on increasing their investment in product imagery, video, and copy for online listings
• 51% plan on increasing their investment in influencer marketing
• 43% are set to increase their investment in branding and packaging
• 41% are upping their financial commitment to product design

The research indicates that most teams tackling online commerce are small, which means opportunity is left on the table. Resource-constrained brands that want to maximise their online growth will likely need to leverage new technologies, AI, and outside partnerships to scale their businesses.