One could view e-commerce today as a mixed bag, even as yin and yang. On one hand, consumers might miss the tactile experience of holding a product or checking clothing for size and quality in a brick-and-mortar store. Yet, e-commerce must be doing something right, judging by the fleet of Amazon Prime vans flooding every township.

E-commerce sites give consumers access to millions of products and gives a company a worldwide market.

For such companies, e-commerce initiatives promise higher margins, inventory flexibility and broad, highly qualified markets, along with risks involving security, consumer privacy, and flawed partnerships.

This Quick Study offers enterprise leaders insight into how to approach e-commerce, the risks and benefits, and how other organizations have found success in e-commerce. So, check out this collection of recent InformationWeek articles for an updated view of e-commerce today.

E-Commerce Basics

Automation Is Everywhere. But Where Do You Start?

There are five core steps that allow companies to bring control, structure, and strategy to their intelligent automation projects, ensuring that the full value of these projects can be realized, Accenture says.

Are Your Strategic Long-Term Partnerships Built to Succeed?

An e-commerce initiative typically requires one or more partnerships. Here are six best practices for setting up or tuning up your organization’s strategic partnerships.

You Get What You Pay For: Cloud Edition

An 8-hour cloud outage during the holiday shopping season could cost a retailer millions of dollars. Here's how CIOs are weighing the risks and costs of outages against the complexities and costs of building resilience.

What Enterprises Can Learn from Digital Disruption

Digital disrupters have changed the rules of competitiveness. Savvy enterprises are paying close attention and learning from e-commerce pioneers like Amazon.

Retailers Choosing Tech Upgrades Over Holiday Magic in 2021

Retailers were busy improving their integration between online and physical sales channels in late 2021. Retailers used to try to create magic in the store to draw shoppers in and get them to spend during the holiday shopping season. Not so much anymore.

Companies Need Customer-Centric Business Process Engineering

Too many applications get deployed, and the customer is last to know. Some of the failures in achieving better customer-centric applications can be traced directly to faulty business process engineering and QA.

IT’s Pivotal Role in Customer Service

Great customer service requires even greater IT -- and it’s time for IT leaders to assume a central role.

Your Peers' Experiences

That DOS Won’t Hunt: Shutterfly CTO Talks Going Cloud

CTO Moudy Elbayadi discusses Shutterfly’s migration of its e-commerce platform from on-prem to the public cloud via MongoDB Atlas on AWS.

FTD’s CTO Powell on Transforming and the Next New Normal

One year after joining the 110-year-old company, Matt Powell discussed the floral e-commerce retailer’s revamp of its infrastructure and use of an analytics and insights platform to improve its customers’ digital experience.

Walmart to Hire 5K as Tech Job Market Stays Tight

Walmart Global Tech, the technology organization within the retail giant, says it will hire 5,000 tech pros in cybersecurity, software engineering, data science, and other specialties in 2022 after growing its numbers by 26% last year.

Why a Low-Code Development Recipe Worked for Pampered Chef

The cookware company needed to create a digital engagement platform it could control rather than remain solely at the mercy of social networks.

How CarParts.com Leveraged AIOps Strategy While Scaling Up

The e-commerce market for auto parts faced a rapid overhaul of its IT infrastructure when new leadership put growth plans in motion.

What Your Customers See

IT Report Card: Customer-Facing Applications

As companies strive to improve their customer experiences, IT is playing a pivotal role. Here are the results so far and what still needs to be done.

Why Customer Experience is the Driver for Modern Commerce Architecture

Since the pandemic, enterprises have upped their digital transformation strategies. To remain competitive today, businesses must adopt a customer-focused architecture.

Reinventing the Customer Experience, One Process at a Time

Customer experience is at the core of all company functions. Organizations should look to new methods of transformation to uncover inefficiencies and drive new value, a Deloitte expert says.

Quick Study: Humanizing and Dehumanizing the Digital Experience

In business’s drive to digital transformation and efficiency, humanizing the digital experience is vital. Here a curated collection of InformationWeek articles that highlight progress made and work to be done.

E-Commerce Tech Trends

How AI and Data Can Help Retail's Ongoing Pandemic Challenges

Retailers during the pandemic faced a pivot to ecommerce, supply chain problems, labor shortages, and inflation. Here's what they expect in 2022, including a shift to hybrid shopping.

Blockchain Report Card: What Does It Matter to Enterprises Now?

Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and smart contracts are staples of the blockchain scene, but is there something more that organizations can benefit from here?

How AI Might Make Commerce in the Future More Human

Natural language, conversational systems can better connect consumers and brands, but they need automation that understands conversation to achieve scale.

The Power of Technology for the Middle Market Sector

For mid-market companies to stay ahead, business leaders will need to adopt a tech-focused mindset. Ecommerce represents a key area for the mid-size sector's tech investments, according to Capital One.

Tech Advances in Retail/Food Industry During the Pandemic

The pandemic changed everything. The resulting technology adaptations rode the change to ensure survival of consumers and businesses alike. Much of it is here to stay.