Where is e-commerce heading? Three takeaways for retail brands

Where is e-commerce actually heading? What changes for a fashion or retail brand in the next few years, and what can you start doing about it today? That's the question we sat down to unpack on the "We Love Belgian Brands" podcast, with boutique owner Dominique Somers (SKM), Katrien Meermans of PR and trend-research studio Stille Bliksem, styling-tech founder Christina Hadinoto (Contour Lab), and our co-founder John Galeyn. Watch the whole episode now, or read our most important take-aways!

1. Most brands don't really know their customer yet

Ask a brand who their customer is, and chances are you'll get a tidy persona from a marketing deck. But when you look at what they really have, and it turns out it's just the basics: name, email, what someone bought, and maaaaybe a birthday if you're lucky.

But the real insights? It's in the heads of your shop floor team. The stylist who clocks that you keep grabbing the wrong size, or talks you into a colour you'd never have picked yourself. The catch: when that person leaves, all of that knowledge walks out the door with them. As Christina put it, when she asks brands how well they know their customers, most have to admit: not that well.

So that's the gap to close. The brands that start now, getting to know their real customers instead of the made-up ones, are going to be way ahead in a few years. Because those brands can actually help their customers and provide them what they need.

2. Your webshop is becoming one door of many

Remember when the online store was basically a digital shop window? Those days are long gone. People find and buy stuff all over the place now: TikTok, Instagram, influencers, and even ChatGPT. Your shop is one of many doors, and on most of them you don't get to decide how your brand shows up. Like John said, when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation, you don't pick the photo or the words. It picks for you.

And those personalized mailings that converted well? Now it's just noise to your customer. Katrien's trend research backs this up: surface-level personalisation has worn off, and the next generation grew up with this stuff, so they expect way more.

Hence why Dominique wants to send a size 34 customer actual size 34 clothes, not the same newsletter everyone else gets.

3. None of it works if your systems can't talk to each other

Here's the unglamorous bit, where the actual work lives. You can have the best personalization plan in the world, but if your till and your webshop don't share data, you can't follow a single customer from one to the other. A lot of cash registers were built to do one thing: take a payment. They were never meant to provide realtime insights, like how often this person has visited the webshop. 

But it's not as simple as it sounds. First hooking up old and new systems is often expensive and clunky, all these layers that are supposedly connected but really aren't. Second, people are trickier than tech. Swapping out a webshop is quick. Getting your shop floor on board with a whole new way of working is slow. So pick your tools carefully, give your team room to adjust, and get your customer data into one place tied to one thing, an email or a customer ID. 

One last thing that came up again and again: people will hand over their data if you're straight with them about why. But you have to choose the right words. "We need this to track you" gets a hard no. "Answer a few quick questions and we'll put together three looks for your summer" gets a yes. Develop personalization in a way that it benefits everyone.

So what do you actually do with all this?

We talk a lot about tech, software, AI. But in the end, those are just enablers to reach your real goal: to get to know your customer better. And the right tech stack is a means to an end, not the end goal.

You don't have to fix everything at once - because you can't. Start small: start asking for mail addresses at the till, connect two tools with each other and make them talk, or send one newsletter - but make it actually relevant. Small acts, same direction: the customer.