By operating their e-commerce unit like a digital startup business, traditional retailers can experiment freely, reward risk-taking, scale successes quickly – and unlock higher growth.
Winning with e-commerce—seeing truly transformational results—takes more than digital platforms and expertise. It requires a holistic strategy and a relentless focus on business value. It means thinking creatively about the customer journey. It demands the right roles and enablers as well as integrating channels and functions so they enhance—and build upon—each other. And crucially, it involves carefully choreographing all of these levers.
Our Approach to E-Commerce
By combining digital expertise and strategy, we help companies seize the full potential of e-commerce. There are a lot of things to get right: e-comm pricing and digital product strategies; digital organization and operating models; new ways of working; cutting edge technologies; and new insights about what works—and doesn’t work—for e-sales. We take an end-to-end approach—one designed to spark innovation, deliver value quickly, and enable companies to continue on the path long after we’ve left the scene.
Our E-Commerce Framework
Different companies are at different stages of their online sales and service journey. So we work closely with businesses to understand where they are today, where they want to be tomorrow, and how they can best reach their goals. This means launching e-commerce from scratch for companies not yet doing it. But it can also mean optimizing existing platforms to extract maximum value from them. Or improving digital marketing efficiency, or enhancing the e-sales experience. Whatever the need—and the ambition—we can flexibly provide the expertise, the insights, and the results: everything from focused strategy to comprehensive digital build solutions.
Our E-Commerce Tools and Resources
We bring an operator’s perspective to e-commerce—because we’ve been there. Before joining BCG, many of our experts were setting up and operating e-commerce businesses. We also leverage our global network of industry, functional, and technical experts: thought leaders in marketing and sales, organizational design, agile ways of working, analytics and AI, digital transformation, and more.
Our e-commerce consulting draws on all of these capabilities—including the specialized resources of BCG X, our tech build and design unit. This hybrid strategy and digital approach is what make our teams unique and poised to tackle the challenges—and opportunities—of your business.
We also draw upon proprietary BCG tools, which help us gauge where your company stands—and how best to shape its e-commerce strategy.
Experience Assessment
Using a suite of automated tests (covering areas such as site latency, standards adherence, website functionality, and online support), our e-commerce consultants evaluate the online experience. By comparing scores against a 10,000-company, cross-industry database, we can identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for focus.
Design Assessment
We examine digital experiences from the perspective of the customer—and with their expectations in mind. Ethnographic research lets us evaluate how users engage with e-sales channels, and understand how well—or poorly—those channels anticipate customer needs, provide effective navigation, help users prevent and recover from errors, and more.
Technical Assessment
This diagnostic helps us analyze current platforms, performance, and integrations, and understand how they will accelerate—or hinder—an e-commerce strategy. It lets us identify the technical gaps as well as the investments that can close them.
Capability Assessment
We use a comprehensive assessment, covering more than 100 dimensions and benchmarked against your industry, to gauge e-commerce capabilities across five maturity levels. This lets us see where companies may already be best in class from an internal capability perspective—and where they need to step up their game.
Explore Our Insights on E-Commerce
Article
November 27, 2023
Subscription media companies need margin-based marketing approaches that let them reach high-value audiences cost effectively. Precision analytics and AI can help.
Article
October 31, 2023
E-commerce dynamics are changing. Our global survey reveals the approaches differentiating retail and consumer packaged goods winners and laggards in today’s increasingly competitive environment.
Article
June 16, 2023
BCG and Shopify looked at 1 billion data points across more than 220,000 sites to determine the best ways for sellers to optimize their e-commerce conversion rates.
