Jason & Scot Show Episode 8 E-Commerce Predictions for 2016

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 8 covers Jason & Scot’s predictions for 2016.  Also Scot’s visit to the Amazon Book store and Jason’s visit to CES.  

Subscribe:

Scots top 5 predictions for 2016:

1. 2016 will be the year of Chat Commerce
2. Amazon will make some big moves in logistics
3. Jet will prove the naysayers wrong, and get acquired
4. Google will make a bold move this year in e-commerce that surprises everyone
5. Alibaba’s attempts to bring Singles day to the US will fail

Jason top 5 predictions for 2016:

1. CPG’s and grocery will make major moves into DTC e-commerce
2. Re-Orgs. Retailers will get rid of stand alone e-commerce departments and integrate e-commerce into core business functions; brands will do the opposite and establish new e-commerce departments.
3. Mobile gap will narrow to be at lest half of desktop conversion and some retailers will see 50% of their e-commerce revenue come from mobile devices
4. A major retailer will get sold in distress (Macy’s/Sears/9 West/J Crew/Bon Ton/Neiman Marcus)
5. 2016 will be the year of the cloud for E-commerce platforms, Cloud products like Shopify and Big Commerce will continue to grow and even get more enterprise clients.  Niche solutions like Cloud Craze (running on force.com) will get traction, and SAP, IBM, and Oracle will work hard to solidify their e-commerce cloud offerings.

Things that (sadly) aren’t likely to happen in 2016:

• Buy buttons from social networks won’t catch on.  Social commerce will continue to struggle.
• E-Commerce sites won’t get much better at personalization (and most suck now).
• We won’t see many great examples of truely integrating content and commerce
• Omni-Channel retailers won’t close the gap with Amazon
• No single new Payment technology will gain major traction.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s going to build an Iron Man style J.A.R.V.I.S digital assistant for his home.  This reminded Jason & Scot of a similar effort by Bill Gates in 1995.

Scot got to visit the Amazon store, and check out how Amazon’s merchandising translates to brick and mortar

Jason is at CES.  There are many more products supporting interoperability this year, such as Ford integrating with Amazon Echo, Toyota supporting IFTTT, Roku and Apple set-top boxes offering universal search integrating multiple content sources.  Expect a more detailed CES recap next week.

Scott is excited about the new Faraday electric car that was announced at CES. 

Jason and Scot have both pre-ordered the new Oculus Rift, although Scot is scheduled for delivery 2 months before Jason.

Episode 8 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 7th, 2016.