About Christian Otto Grötsch

Christian lebt E-Commerce wie kein anderer. Als einer der Gründer, langjähriger Geschäftsführer und jetzt Vorsitzender des Verwaltungsrats der Digitalagentur dotSource setzt er seit 2006 gemeinsam mit seinem Team visionäre Digitalprojekte um. Dank seiner jahrelangen Erfahrung hat er ein besonders Gespür dafür, welche digitalen Trends kommen, um zu bleiben. Um diese zu teilen, hat er 2007 den Handelskraft Blog ins Leben gerufen, der bis heute auf seine Expertise baut.

B2C online trade is still shining with growth

Federal statistics show that the number of people using the internet for private shopping or orders has grown by 30 percent since 2008. Thanks to higher employment rates, increasing wages, low inflation, low interest rates and a relatively low savings levels, the conditions for trade are currently excellent.

A survey among 1,200 companies by the Germany trade association, the Handelsverband Deutschland (HDE) shows a correspondingly positive atmosphere: a good third expect turnover growth, and with multichannel companies it is even three quarters. Growth drivers are still the large orderers: people who order something online at least ten times per year. That makes approximately 14.5 million Germans.

Umsatz E-Commerce 2014
Source: emarketer

According to this, e-commerce growth should level-off at 10 percent by 2018. It currently lies at 19.3 percent globally. This prognosis includes both wares and services in B2C.

However, the end of the growth is foreseeable. The three to five years an even stronger concentration and consolidation processes will come. E-Commerce is maturing and despite current growth, has long been in the first great professionalisation phase, especially in better developed markets, such as Great Britain, Germany, and France. This can also be seen in internet use. Here in Germany this is declining slightly according to an online study by ARD/ZDF this year.

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Rewe and the crux of the matter in grocery delivery

REWE Lieferservice
Photo: REWE Presse
Rewe has said goodbye to their slogan “market prices” and are now working on their online prices. What is making itself felt at the moment is that offers and specials are not valid online. Observers are also talking about other price increases (see the comments ont3n). Even if every fourth German orders groceries online now according to Bitkom, online grocery trade is still a tough business.

The problem is that customer and trader points of view differ greatly. Large packaging, toilet paper or even heavy crates of drinks are attractive for delivery from the customer perspective, but at the same time they have an especially low profit margin.

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Colours in e-commerce: when emotions lead to sales

Grafik: Johann Dréo
Graphic: Johann Dréo

Shop operators don’t just have to take care of usability, a functional internal search or the perfect check-out when it comes to raising conversion rates. In e-commerce, as in every other area of life as well, emotions play a decisive role. Spontaneous purchases are initiated by a certain feeling. For instance, you can create feeling about the price: joy at finding such a good offer. Feelings are also triggered by colour. Red creates a different emotion to blue or green.

Colours are one of the few stimuli in e-commerce which speak directly to the senses. Apart from the basic colour, the colour scheme of the navigation bar and other controls is important for emotional customer address. White or light grey for instance, stands for seriousness, while the colour red draws attention. But can colour really raise conversion rates?

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E-Commerce is in the spotlight more and more – and not always in a good way

NeulandCurrent numbers show what has long been supposed: when it comes to internet know-how, the Germans aren’t doing so well. We’re doing even worse compared with other European countries. Only five percent of the population can claim to have good internet skills. That is fewer than in almost any other European country. The Germans don’t know how the internet works. Angela Merkel’s #Neuland is closer to the reality than we thought.

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Dynamic Pricing: Price management the B2B Way

Foto: Javierafael
Photo: Javierafael

Determine the purchasing price yourself – every customer’s dream. With the model of dynamic pricing the purchaser comes one step closer to the realisation of this dream, at least partly. Providers, such as start-up Jet, promise price reductions of up to 15 percent, as long as a product is purchased in a participating shop close to the customer.

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Glass App for Trade: Google takes the wind out of Tesco’s Sails

Tesco Glass App
Graphic: Tesco Labs – Screenshot

Google is used to making the rules, not just in online marketing. This was visible with Tesco – they just introduced a shopping app, supposed to allow customers to shop via Google Glass, which is now a product without any purpose because Google announced a stop to the sale of the data glasses that same week. The project “Glass” will continue and pass on to some departments, but no more details have made it to the public. There are even rumours that Google might have failed.

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We celebrate our 9th year

dotSource GmbH LogoFolklore says that cats have nine lives. We also reinvent ourselves every year. However, we didn’t just use the e-commerce turbo year 2013 to storm ahead at full tilt. With more than 103 staff, by the middle of the year it was time to reorganise and take a look within before continuing with fresh new power. The results are visible, for instance, on our new homepage.
dotSource Homepage

New projects and partnerships

In 2014 we also made numerious customers happy. We realised exciting new e-commerce projects, including ones for Joyou, Lensbest and lolaandgrace.com.

monoqibusiness.com, oppose-fashion.com and yink.com were some of our clients in the B2B sector.

Adobe Solution Partner BusinessOur partner landscape is expanding. We’re Adobe Business Solution partners, Advanced partners of eZ Publish, for whom we developed a Magento Connector.

We also made an alliance with the real time personalisation experts from prudsys. The signs are clear on the topic of digital transformation.

“Digital is better”

The world is becoming digital – this is also the focus of one of our whitepapers from this year on the topic. We haven’t just shared our e-commerce expertise solely in (around 300) blog posts, we also published a total of seven whitepapers on e-commerce and online marketing topics. We released the annual Trend Book for the third time, which examines the most important trends in electronic trade und the title “Digital ist Besser” – the name is the program.

At home everythere

Handelskraft Frühstück
Our Handelskraft E-Commerce Breakfasts in 2014 once again led us to eight cities in Germany and one in Switzerland and brought together traders and manufacturers at one table. Our home game in Jena, Thuringia was a great success. Those who always wanted to know what happens at one of these breakfasts can get an idea from our video retrospective .

The K5 and the dmexco were further memorable highlights of the trade fair season 2014.

The world according to dotSource

dotSource Online Marketing
Our Online Marketing Team. Photo (c) dotSource GmbH

The year began with some new comers. We were happy to greet four Online Marketing Experts, who round off our service portfolio in the areas of SEO, SEA, newsletter- and conversion optimisation. Our sometimes a little nerdy team, who have sometimes demanded we change the agency’s name out of a love of Mate , won all our hearts, and not only those of the new staff: 2014 saw ex-colleagues come back to us four times.

For the first time, since their proud opening three years ago, it is getting full in our agency’s offices, and there are rumors that plans are being made for new offices. This hasn’t stopped us from occasionally letting rip in our holy halls. Apart from the compulsory team event, there are monthly team parties, whose mottos range from the 1990s to Oktoberfest. The view of the fantastic Jener culture arena sweetens many a summer evening for us, when we round off the day with Travis, Flogging Molly and Bosse.

Off into our tenth year!

We’re just like the typical fourth grader who waits feverishly for the two-digit birthday and have a lot planned in the meantime. The mission for our tenth is year is still: Digital success right from the start. We are looking forward to getting started again together with our clients and partners

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Net find: When the selfie-stick gets stuck in your smartphone

When people used to go sightseeing, you’d often find yourself having a stranger’s camera shoved into your hand so that you could take a photo of its owner. This is a thing of the past: these days, many hobby photographers own a selfie-stick and don’t have to let their beloved smartphone out of their sight. We don’t want to comment on whether this is sensible or utter nonsense here. But the fact is, that selfie-sticks can often be a strange sight, for instance, when the smartphone to suddenly rings.

What is your optinion of this new trend in smartphone photography? A nice gimmick or a tool for teenagers?

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Battle of the payment providers

Foto:zonaponsel.com
Photo:zonaponsel.com

Amazon is often the non plus ultra in e-commerce, regardless of the area. But in the field of payment gateways, the Etail company recently had to concede a bitter defeat. In general, the struggle in the payment market is hard, and in Germany it is fuelled by the imminent revolution in the mobile payment sector.

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