4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

Welcome to TechCrunch+ Friday

Data privacy is top of mind for online sellers, and for good reason: Regulators in China, Europe and North America are taking an interest, and iOS 14.5 allowed many consumers to disable data tracking, with negative consequences for companies that relied on Facebook’s granular ad targeting.

Bearing those factors and others in mind, Ben Parr, president and co-founder of e-commerce marketing platform Octane.ai, shared his e-commerce predictions for 2022:

• Personalization and zero-party data become critical.
• E-commerce embraces web3 and NFTs, but what will that look like?
• Live shopping goes mainstream.
• Slow but gradual improvement to the supply chain.

If you manage an e-commerce startup’s brand, this is a helpful overview; Parr even weighs in on whether startups need to begin putting NFTs on their virtual shelves this year.

“I’m also eager to see brands utilize tokens for loyalty and rewards, a topic I’ve heard people discuss but not yet embrace.”

My prediction: We’ll be running many articles in 2022 with tactics for zero-party data collection. Google temporarily postponed its plan to deprecate third-party cookies until the latter half of 2023, which means the ad tech landscape is going to undergo tectonic shifts.

We have more expert-written posts with 2022 predictions in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Thanks very much for reading,

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

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After talking to marketing leaders for a year, here’s my advice for CEOs

This is a fantastic time to launch a startup, but if you’re trying to grow one — well, winter is coming.

We’ve already noted the impacts of new data regulations and consumers’ growing desire for more privacy, but here’s another log to toss on the bad news fire: As a percentage of company revenue, marketing budgets plummeted from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% last year.

“This is the lowest proportion allocated to marketing in the history of Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey,” the research company reported.

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VCs and founders are max bullish as public markets flash warning signs

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