Buyer's Guide: Why Ecommerce is a Strategic Imperative
These examples provide a glimpse of what's possible. For many book publishers, simply enabling their sites for ecommerce is a good, and logical, first step. They must then create opportunities to engage more deeply with consumers. In other words, give them more reasons to interact, and presumably buy, directly from the publishers themselves. Adopting marketing best practices that encompass multiple channels and content types is an important step in reaching consumers where they already are-on the go across the world. (See the section on marketing automation tools on page 26 for information on staying in front of today's audiences.)
A New, Bumpy Road
Developing a sophisticated ecommerce platform introduces some new challenges for publishers. Providing a web presence with functioning ecommerce now comes with the extra burden of being usable on a variety of mobile devices, browsers, and operating systems. Providing online payment capabilities introduces security issues and regulatory requirements around use and protection of customer information, not to mention digital rights management for ebook sellers.