Mediaboss Marketing

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce, today at the Digital River Globalocity commerce conference in Los Angeles, Calif., announced the results of a survey of 250 senior decision makers from companies in the software, games and consumer electronics markets. The survey asked companies about their commerce plans for expanding into new online channels and geographies, their biggest online challenges as well as their expectations for revenue growth in the next two years.

The survey reaffirms what we have been seeing for some time that e-commerce will increasing shift to a multi-channel approach for commerce. Companies are looking for more ways to connect directly with their customers and offer them more choices when it comes to purchasing online whether that be mobile, social, in app, subscriptions or other options, said Joel Ronning, Digital Rivers CEO. The survey also pointed out the need for companies to reassess their global commerce readiness. Local is the new global today. We were surprised to see how many companies are still not vested in a fully localized online strategy. The growing generation of customers shopping online and across borders want to be greeted in their native dialect by a company that understands their local culture and norms. The ability to interact with the customer at this level, anytime and on any device is critically important to success in todays online market.

Similar sentiments were echoed in the remarks Ronning made during his keynote speech at Globalocity. The conference drew approximately 700 commerce professionals from the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Companies are Going Multi-Channel to Establish More Direct Connections with Customers Consistent with the shift to multi-channel online strategies, the survey indicated respondents are increasingly connecting with customers via multiple touch points. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said they were currently using transactional websites, followed by social commerce (55%), app stores (50%), in-product commerce (50%), subscription sales (48%) and mobile commerce (48%).

Looking out over the next two years, 46 percent of the respondents said they plan to expand their commerce strategies to include mobile commerce followed by app stores (40%), in-product commerce (38%) for gaming and software sectors only, subscriptions (36%), and social commerce (34%).

In the next two years, respondents expect nearly a third of their online revenue will continue to be generated from their online stores, with nearly 20 percent of revenue coming from the mobile channel, which is the channel they also said they are most likely to adopt in the next two years. Despite social commerces heavy use at the present time, respondents expect their mobile revenue will outpace their social revenue in two years time.

The percentage of online revenue they expect to generate from other channels include: app stores (17%), social commerce (17%), subscriptions (14%) and in-product commerce (13%). To support their multi-channel expansion efforts, companies are prioritizing core commerce initiatives. Fifty percent of organizations report that security tops the list of their highest priority 2012 e-commerce projects, followed by customer relationship management (40%) and business intelligence (36%).

Companies are Falling Short on Global Commerce Readiness The survey also points to some areas where companies selling into global online markets could be doing better and where customers stand to benefit from additional commerce investment or development efforts including the area of global commerce readiness.

Only about half of the companies surveyed reported that their commerce offerings are fully localized for the markets they are serving. That includes 57% not having customer service options fully localized, 50% not having payment options fully localized and 44% not having layout fully localized.

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Digital River Announces Results of International Commerce Survey