Last week Forrester published a report on the state of online retail in Canada. We surveyed 1,103 adult online shoppers in Canada to understand what challenges the Canadian public face when shopping online. We found that Canadian online shoppers have many complaints; among them high shipping costs and lackluster product assortments. Furthermore, Canadian online shoppers are acutely aware of the gap between the online experiences of domestic sites versus those in the US. Canadian sites are missing key online capabilities like free shipping, flexible pickup options, a stress-free return policy, and omnichannel payment options in addition to the obvious price discrepancies.

Some of the reports highlights include the following facts:

• Shipping costs are too still too high. Despite the eventual arrival of Amazon Prime in Canada and the increasing commonality of free shipping thresholds, sixty-eight percent of Canadian online shoppers we surveyed cited that delivery costs are their primary concern when shopping online.
• Product assortment online in Canada is lackluster. Thirty-seven percent of Canadian online shoppers say they can't find the products they are looking for online in Canada. Consequently, 32% of these frustrated shoppers ultimately end up buying instead from US or International sites and incurring the cost of shipping, custom duties and Canadian taxes.

Ten years ago, Forrester published some research with the slightly awkward title of ‘New Payment Systems’ Survival Guide’. One of our findings was that many successful new payment systems have some kind of ‘must-have’ transaction that encourages customers to go through the hassle of learning how to use a new system in the first place. Good examples of ‘must-have’ transactions include eBay’s auctions for PayPal, travel to work for Transport for London’s Oyster, and online shopping for iDeal.

Ever since, I’ve been seeking the ‘must-have’ transaction that will spark consumer adoption of mobile payments in developed economies. But what if there isn’t one? (And, after 10 years, it’s probably time to admit that there isn’t). The answer is to focus relentlessly on both lowering the barriers to mobile payment by making it as easy as possible for customers to use a new system and to increase the benefits by maximizing the number of ways and places customers can use a system.

At Forrester, we've recently launched playbooks on topics such as Agile Commerce, Retail eCommerce, and B2B eCommerce. We are now getting underway with an eCommerce globalization playbook: Our first report on The Global eCommerce Opportunity (subtitle Landscape: The eCommerce Globalization Playbook) just went live. In the report, we discuss topics such as:

Which regions of the world are top of mind for brands today. The idea of a globally connected world is appealing, yet we are very much at the early stages of international expansion when it comes to eCommerce.** We look at typical global expansion paths and which regions are seeing an influx of new eCommerce initiatives. US and European retailers have tended to expand into each other’s regions first with an eCommerce offering – increasingly, however, both US and European brands are taking a much more Asia-centric approach. Coach, for example, only offers eCommerce-enabled sites in the US, Canada, China, and Japan.

With mobile and tablet usage now mainstream, a big hurdle for eBusiness professionals is how to scale digital experiences across consumer touchpoints without dragging development momentum to a near halt in the process. But how?

In previous research, we’ve highlighted the advantages of responsive web design and how it can simplify the development of web experiences across multiple consumer touchpoints. In our latest report, we explain how one company, SunTrust Banks, began an initiative to simultaneously improve its internal web project delivery processes while expanding its digital presence across new consumer touchpoints.

SunTrust, like many enterprise organizations, was expereincing a painstakingly slow, and costly, rollout of its digital platform. Demands from the business for digital experiences were on the rise, resulting in a 200% year-over-year growth in project requests. At the same time, SunTrust’s total traffic coming from mobile reached almost 10% of total digital traffic and tablet traffic was on the rise. With more and more devices emerging at a breakneck pace, the digital team at SunTrust knew they had to rethink their approach to web development. The team landed on responsive web design as a solution to their problems. Reponsive design enabled the digital team at SunTrust to focus resources on building and maintaining a single web platform instead of maintaining and optimizing multiple fragmented user experiences. They call it “The Power Of One.”