The ecommerce landscape is quickly being reshaped and Byron Sorrells is here for that.
“We’re finally entering a new era of ecommerce that is more deconstructed, distributed, native,” said the co-founder and CEO of Dispatch, an e-commerce and adtech platform. Sorrells launched Dispatch to enable brands to extend their checkout experience and sell their products in every possible channel, from social media posts to online games.
“The brand is having to go to where the user is, because the user is not coming and spending time on their website,” said Sorrells. “There’s an opportunity to turn these channels that were previously maybe just awareness or read-only into more of a read/write engagement channel that could even be a conversion channel.”
“We’re not a back-end platform to run your e-commerce on,” he said. “We take your store and put it in places where it previously was not.” And this means the brand, and not the platform, gets all the customer information, which is useful for further contacts and building brand loyalty.
Retailers that don’t capture first-party data, risk being left behind, said Sorrells. “If they don’t, someone else will,” he said.
The development is still very nascent, but brands will need to reckon with it sooner or later, as major platforms begin experimenting. For instance, Roku has added a Buy Now functionality to its streaming. The objective is always to efficiently sell more stuff to more people, and shoppers are looking for convenience and shopping in context, said Sorrells, since this is where users spend their time.
For example, Walmart now has a shopping experience on Roblox; that’s a platform with 70 million active users who spend approximately two-and-a half hours daily on it. “Walmart is saying: ‘Well, these are potential buyers. I’m going to put my real-world items where these potential buyers are,’” he said.
Many ecommerce platforms facilitate back-end operations for brands to complete sales, without changing the consumer experience. While the spike in online shopping seen during the days of pandemic lockdown has abated slightly, consumer habits have been reshaped permanently. The most recent U.S. Commerce Department retail sales numbers showed record e-commerce penetration in the first quarter of 2024, and numbers pretty close to what was seen in 2020, when in-store shopping was not an option.
During the COVID pandemic, consumers jumped to embrace digital wallets, QR codes and other tools that enabled e-commerce. They got used to the convenience of clicking a “Buy it Now” button on Amazon and bypassing the shopping cart and checkout screen altogether. Additionally, social commerce has grown exponentially since the pandemic, and platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are far ahead in developing the ability to transact sales in their feeds.
Retailers are facing the same challenge that music labels faced when iTunes began selling song downloads. While consumers began to download singles, the labels were still focused on albums. Eventually, the record companies caught on to the shift in consumer behavior. Retailers will also have to follow consumers.
“It’s like the early days of e-commerce: ‘Well, credit cards online? That’s crazy!’ And we’re now at another kind of frontier moment where it’s: ‘No, no, I want to protect my UX, my customer journey and my brand.,’” said Sorrells. “But they’re going to have to eventually surrender some aspects of that and let it happen on Instagram, or you miss out on the sale.”
Retailers want to retain control of their brand image, but the rise of social media and omnichannel retail is moving control into the hands of consumers and creators. For brands, jumping in the fray is one way to take back control, and participate in those conversations. Distributed retail may actually help build brand loyalty and engagement if marketers can engage with social interactions to move consumers from consideration to trial or purchase.
“What if you as the brand could just jump in and you’re not just typing a message, dropping a picture or video, but you’re actually dropping a shoppable moment?” said Sorrells. “Jumping in is one thing, but jumping in with the ability to complete a sales transaction is so powerful.”
Sorrells points out that the Dispatch integration is transparent, and the shopper gets the same experience as if they were shopping in the brand’s website, only in another location. “It’s their customer. They always get all the data, all the time,” said Sorrell.
“They control the relationship with the user. We are just facilitating the fact that it can happen somewhere else. Because otherwise, you’ve got to go build all these different experiences to put them in different places,” he said. Brands want to test and learn on new platforms such as social media, chat, connected TV and gaming. They could even test the connected car, so drivers can use voice prompts to shop for an item advertised in a podcast they are listening to.
“The idea of hitting the user in the moment where they are, and sending that information straight back to the brand is what we’re in the business of doing, so that the brand doesn’t lose that relationship,” said Sorrells. “We’re in the middle of that circle, tying it all together, distributing these moments out into the world—whether it be social, or in a chat or connected TV or a good, old-fashioned display ad on the web.”
