Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) und adaptive E-Commerce-Strategie

Adaptive e-commerce is commerce that changes what it does according to what the customer is doing. The path, the questions asked and the steps skipped are not the same for a first-time comparison and a routine reorder. Most direct channels are built the other way round: one generic funnel for everyone, a recommendation rail added on top, and a single blended conversion rate that averages together activities with nothing in common. Vivaldi has worked on demand-side and route-to-market strategy since 1999, and this is the strategy work that decides what a live direct operation has to become once the decision to sell direct has already been made.

• Seit 1999Nachfrageseite und Markteinführungsstrategie
• Über 200veröffentlichte Fallstudien
• 10 Niederlassungenauf vier Kontinenten
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche: Das Beste aus den Bereichen Beratung, Strategie und Innovation

Wenn Unternehmen uns beauftragen

• The direct channel is live and growing slowly, and the cost base is getting harder to defend in the annual plan.
• Conversion work has plateaued. Testing keeps producing small wins on an average that hides four different customer situations.
• Personalization was bought and installed, and nobody can point to a decision the customer data now changes.
• Direct and retail are discounting against each other, and no one has written down what each channel is for.
• A replatforming decision is coming, and the commercial logic the platform is supposed to serve has never been stated.

If the question is still whether to sell direct at all, this is not the page you need: our direct-to-consumer programs work settles the business-model case, the acquisition economics and the channel consequences before anything is built, and that decision should be made first.

Why personalizing a single funnel does not change the numbers

The standard diagnosis is that direct commerce got harder because acquisition costs rose. That is true and it is usually not the binding constraint.

The binding constraint is structural. A direct channel is typically built as one path, then personalized at the surface: a product rail, a reordered module, an email segment. Underneath, a customer replenishing something they have bought nine times and a customer comparing a considered purchase for the first time walk the same screens, answer the same questions and are measured in the same number. Personalization of that kind changes what is shown. It does not change what the customer has to do, which is where the friction and the cost actually sit.

The second structural problem is where the channel sits. A direct channel that takes sales retail would have made has added cost and moved revenue between pockets. A direct channel that reaches demand retail cannot serve, carries assortment partners do not want, and returns data that improves decisions elsewhere in the business is a different asset, and it is worth a different amount. Most direct operations have never had that distinction written down, so they are judged on revenue captured and defended on sentiment.

So the useful question is not how to raise the conversion rate. It is which customer activities this channel is uniquely good at serving, and whether the commerce experience is built to serve them differently.

What our adaptive e-commerce services include

Four pieces of work. Which of them you need depends on how much of the direct operation is already running and how much of its logic has been written down.

1. Naming the activities worth designing for

Customers are not moving through a funnel. They are doing something specific: comparing before a considered purchase, replenishing, buying for someone else, upgrading, or solving a problem with a product they already own. We establish the handful of activities that account for most of the value, stated in the customer’s terms rather than the organization’s, identify which of them the direct channel serves better than any retailer or marketplace can, and find the ones currently forced down a path designed for a different activity entirely.

2. Designing commerce that adapts to the activity

Adaptation belongs in the flow, not in a widget bolted onto it. We specify different paths for different activities, with the shortest route given to the highest-frequency one, define what data is worth collecting on the test that it changes what the experience does next, and decide deliberately where a person, a store or a service contact beats another screen. We write the strategy and the design intent; your product and engineering teams or your implementation partner build it.

3. Placing the direct channel inside the demand system

Direct, retail, marketplace and social commerce are one demand system. They can be designed to reinforce each other or left to cannibalize each other by default. We set out what is sold direct, what is sold through partners and why, stated clearly enough that your sales organization can defend it to a retail buyer, along with pricing and assortment logic that does not train customers to wait for the cheapest channel, and a statement of which decisions elsewhere in the business the direct channel’s data is supposed to improve.

4. Measuring by activity rather than in aggregate

Conversion, repeat rate and cost to serve measured within each activity, because a blended number hides the only differences worth acting on. Contribution after fulfillment, returns and service rather than revenue captured. And a stated view of what the channel is worth beyond its own profit and loss, including the demand signal it produces for the rest of the company.

How an adaptive e-commerce engagement works

1. Observe. Customer and non-customer research, a read of your own behavioral and cohort data by activity rather than in aggregate, interviews with retail and marketplace partners, and a review of the paths the current experience actually offers. The output is a map of the activities the channel is serving, well or badly.
2. Decide. Which activities the direct channel should own, which belong with partners, and which are not worth serving at all. The output is a written commercial logic for the channel that the rest of the business has a reason to support.
3. Design. The adaptive flows for the priority activities, the data each one needs and what it changes, the pricing and assortment rules across channels, and the measurement frame. The output is a specification your teams or your platform partner can build against.
4. Embed. Ownership, decision rights and the operating rhythm by which the next adaptation gets decided, so the channel keeps changing after we leave rather than waiting for the next redesign.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for adaptive e-commerce

We are a strategy firm, not a commerce agency. We do not build or operate storefronts, run merchandising, or sell a platform, which means our recommendation about what the channel should do is not shaped by what we would be paid to build afterward.

The part most firms skip is the channel question. Optimizing the direct experience while avoiding what it does to retail and marketplace distribution is the easier half of the work, and it leaves the expensive half with you. Our starting point is the demand side: what customers are trying to get done, and which route to market is best placed to do it. That is the same question we have been working on since 1999, across 10 offices on four continents.

We are also direct about scope. Some direct channels do not have an adaptive commerce problem, they have a proposition problem or a model that never closed, and in those cases we will say so and point you at the right piece of work rather than designing flows on top of an unsound business case.

How to evaluate an e-commerce strategy consultant

Including us. Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist.

• Ask whether they will touch the channel question. A firm that will optimize the direct site but not say what it does to retail is solving the half that is easy to show in a deck.
• Ask what they mean by personalization. If the answer is recommendations and email segmentation, that is merchandising. Adaptive commerce changes the path itself, which is a product decision before it is a campaign one.
• Ask which platform they are partnered with. Commercial relationships with commerce vendors are common and not dishonest, but they are not neutral. You want the recommendation and the incentive separated, or at least declared.
• Ask how they will measure it. If the proposal ends at conversion rate, it will optimize the average and miss the activity differences that are the whole point.
• Ask who runs it after they leave. Adaptive commerce is an operating capability, not a project. If nobody inside the company can decide the next adaptation, you have bought a redesign.

Strategy consultancy vs conversion and personalization vendor vs platform implementer?

Verwandte Arbeiten

Adaptive commerce rarely sits on its own. The connected pieces of our practice:

• Direct-to-consumer programs if the decision to go direct is still open, or a live program’s economics do not close and you need to know whether the model or the execution is wrong.
• Experience strategy, our parent practice, if the question spans every interaction a customer has with you and not the buying experience alone.
• Customer ecosystem strategy and interaction field design if the unit of analysis is the whole system of participants around the brand rather than a single channel.
• Marketplace ecosystem growth strategy if most of the demand pools on third-party marketplaces and the question is how to grow there.
• Commerce strategy if the scope is the full commercial route to market across every channel, not the direct one specifically.
• Connected commerce if the problem is that customer context restarts at every channel instead of traveling with the customer.

Adaptive e-commerce in the US and worldwide

We work with direct and multichannel businesses from 10 offices on four continents, with the US practice based in New York. Most of this work is run with a client team rather than delivered to one, because the decisions involved sit across commercial, digital and retail leadership, and the handover is where this kind of strategy usually fails. Where a direct channel operates across several markets, the activities worth serving differ by market more than the experience does, and the engagement treats that as the point rather than an exception.