E-commerce in 2023 is big business – nobody would contest that, with over $5 trillion thought to have been exchanged in sales last year alone. But the world of online retail is also very fragmented.
Among the 20 million or so businesses thought to be trading on the internet today, one fraction of these can operate at a significant scale. There are many reasons for this, from established market leads to the product categories they sell.
But one key factor is their willingness to embrace and integrate new trends and innovations. One need only look to Amazon, the world’s single largest eCommerce giant, to see this future-oriented approach in action.
By late 2024, Jeff Bezos corporation intends to have a fleet of delivery drones operating in the USA, with plans to expand into new territories undoubtedly soon to follow.
Now naturally such steps are beyond the scope or requirements of the vast majority of e-commerce brands, but steps to modernize correlate with beneficial effects at all scales.
Those looking to gain some insight into the key innovations driving online trade today need only look at what has emerged as arguably the most successful sub-set of global digital media and entertainment today – the world of online casinos.
Those unaware of the steps this industry has taken would likely assume there’s little to differentiate online casinos from their brick-and-mortar counterparts, but in reality, these two sectors have been diverging for decades.
Online casinos managed to establish an early foothold on the internet, with the first examples of this platform becoming popular in the late 1990s. Since then, the sector has sought to take advantage of emergent trends – like the poker boom of the early 00s, and new technologies such as the smartphone, to continue to diversify its portfolio and expand its footprint.
This tactful maneuvering has resulted in a multibillion-dollar industry that is growing at a CAGR of 14%, while its brick-and-mortar forebear, despite heavy investment, is considered to be in decline.
At its root, this is because the online casino industry has been keen to lean into new tech and ideas as they come along – this is perhaps unsurprising, given that once upon a time, the notion of a digital casino was just one further example of this enterprising approach.
So if those e-commerce names lagging behind the curve were to take cues from the online casino industry’s playbook in 2023, what steps should they take?
Eschewing Algorithms
Algorithms now run virtually every part of our lives, from helping us to choose what to watch on Netflix to suggesting products to go with our shopping cart and even tailoring our social media feeds to see more of what we like.
But algorithms have limits, and in the algorithm age, sometimes eschewing them can have a positive impact on consumer regard.
The world of online casinos has emerged as a frontrunner in putting human expertise back in the driving seat.
This is nowhere more apparent than with the rise of dedicated review and bonus platforms such as CasinoBonusCA which collates the most popular online casinos out there and ranks them based on the input of industry experts.
In doing so, patrons of this platform know that they’re getting real insider information, rather than a list produced by mere number-crunching.
This lends greater trust, which reflects well on the wider industry. In addition to comprehensive reviews, such sites also furnish their patrons with competitive welcome offers and sign-up deals for use with any of their top-ranked platforms, making them cost-effective as well as trustworthy.
Laying the Groundwork for DeFi
DeFi is short for decentralized finance and is a catch-all term used to encompass all of the next-generation forms of financing we’re seeing gaining popularity today.
Of course, the most prominent example of this trend are crypto-currencies, and the online casino sector has distinguished itself as one of the first major public-facing goods and services providers to begin offering their customers the option to make payments and deposits using popular assets like bitcoin and Ethereum.
Crypto has encountered several setbacks in its bid to become a more widespread payment processing method, not least due to the volatility of crypto coin prices versus fiat currency. But with noteworthy advantages in terms of security and anonymity, the public appetite for its inclusion as a payment option is only growing, and online businesses of all types would do well to follow the online casino sector’s example in this respect.
