This coming Thursday, RSR will release the results of our 2013 eCommerce benchmark survey. We had an interesting group of respondents this year, with half reporting annual revenue of under $6 million. Now, before you say to yourself “Oh, we’re much bigger than that – it has no relevance to us ” let me take a moment and tell you why it is VERY relevant to you. As it turns out, when responding to many of this year’s questions, the smallest and largest (over $1 billion in annual sales) retailers have very similar concerns and thought processes. They both race to keep up with the thousand pound online gorilla, Amazon.

What was far more notable to us was the difference in responses from Retail Winners and Laggards. RSR has a core tenet that Retail Winners over-perform in annual sales for a reason. They tend to think and act differently than their competitors. Sometimes this is readily evident in our survey results, sometimes we have to look a little deeper to find it. This was one of those “readily evident ” reports, sometimes stunningly so.

Now, I don’t want to give away the farm here… after all, we’d like you to download and read the full report. But let me give you a few tidbits to whet your appetite:

• Laggards are challenged to get consumers to engage with them online, while Winners are much more interested in the fundamentals that drive demand – gaining understanding of those same consumers. This is a fairly common difference between a Winners and a laggard: one focuses on the path to a goal, the other tends to just want to get to the finish line.
• Amazon (and its “Prime “) offering has set an insanely high bar for fulfillment speed, and everyone else chases that speed without sacrificing profits. Just as we saw in our cross-channel strategy report, getting more efficient at fulfillment and speed is a key operational challenge for retailers of all sizes and shapes.
• Retailers are seeing opportunity to leverage their eCommerce platforms in interesting and creative ways, most especially in their stores. We’re not ready for full-blown eCommerce driven POS quite yet, but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s coming. Sometime in the next three years, we’ll see convergence.
• Winners in particular, and retailers in general are very interested in getting a “streamlined technology platform or infrastructure ” to get out of the tangled technology mess they find themselves in. This is true (again) for retailers regardless of size. We could actually argue, the larger the retailer, the bigger the tangled web to be unraveled.
• Budgets are down, but appetites remain robust for new technologies.

The one secret I’m not going to give away here is the relative opinions about various eCommerce tech enablers between Retail Winners and laggards. It’s a guaranteed mind-boggler, and well worth the read. You know it’s surprising when I’m forced to ask myself “What business do these folks think they’re in, exactly? “

So that’s a very brief taste. Check your in-boxes on Thursday for an email fromanalysts@rsrresearch.com.It’ll be your invitation to download what for us was a very interesting study.