As the planet’s largest e-commerce platform, Amazon generated a total net sales of about $137 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone. The app ranks as the most-used shopping site in the United States and more than 20 other countries where shoppers can’t get enough of its Prime Day deals and two-day deliveries. 

But even with its dominance in the marketplace, it’s still got some competition. Smartlook curated a list of the countries where Amazon was not the most-used e-commerce platform by analyzing data from GlobalWebIndex gathered in 2020. To compile the information, GWI provided a representative sample of internet users in 46 countries (where GWI has logistical partners for surveys) with a list of 26 e-commerce apps tracked by the marketing research firm. GWI then asked the respondents which apps they used in the last month. Responses were analyzed to create a list of countries with the highest rate of adoption for each app.

While Amazon was the most popular in 21 of the 46 responding countries, the survey found that “55% of internet users have used one of the 26 commerce apps” that were tracked. E-commerce has shaped the majority of internet users’ shopping experiences, and there’s a good chance that will continue into the future.

Sample sizes for each country ranged from 954 (Morocco) to 25,670 (U.S.) and were sourced from a range of people from 16–64 years old. Quotas were placed on age, gender, and education. Figures are representative of the online populations of each market, not its total population. In addition to noting countries that had the highest reported rates of use for a specific app, this story lists up to five other countries where the app was also the most popular. 

Argentina

• Most-used e-commerce app: MercadoLibre
• 64% of respondents in Argentina used app in the last month
• Other countries where app ranks first: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia

Founded in 1991 by Marcos Galperin while he was a student at Stanford University, MercadoLibre can be used all over Latin America. Inspired by eBay, Galperin created MercadoLibre with a similar auction-style marketplace. Users can purchase items ranging from laptops and beauty products to tools and bikes.

In 2021, MercadoLibre generated more than $7 billion in revenue, remaining a premiere app in Latin America at more than 30 years old. With its headquarters in Buenos Aires, it may not be too surprising that this e-commerce app generates most of its user base from Argentina.

Poland

• Most-used e-commerce app: Allegro
• 62% of respondents in Poland used app in the last month

Allegro is one of the oldest e-commerce platforms on this list, having been established in Poznań, Poland, in 1999. According to the company’s website, the original version of Allegro’s software “was so small that it could fit on one floppy disk.” An average floppy disc could hold up to about 1.5 megabytes of data.

In 2010, the company developed mobile apps for shopping on the go, when they reached a million downloads by 2012. Allegro’s marketplace is made up of 125,000 retailers and claims to serve 20 million customers per month. In November 2021, Allegro purchased Mimovrste, the largest online retailer in Slovenia with 18 million members, in a deal worth 881 million euros.

China

• Most-used e-commerce app: Alipay
• 47% of respondents in China used app in the last month

Similar to payment apps like PayPal and Venmo, Alipay is an eWallet app that allows users to pay for goods and services digitally. Founded by business mogul and investor Jack Ma, the company was created in 2004 by Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China.

In 2013, Alipay surpassed PayPal as the most popular mobile payment platform. That year, the company announced that it handled $150 billion in online payments while PayPal only processed $27 billion. According to its Apple app store description, Alipay services are used by more than 1.2 billion users located all over the world.

Australia

• Most-used e-commerce app: eBay
• 36% of respondents in Australia used app in the last month
• Other countries where app ranks first: Malaysia

EBay is an online marketplace that can be used all over the world to sell and purchase products. Headquartered in San Jose, California, both retailers and private individuals can sell products on this platform.

Like Allegro and MercadoLibre, eBay was founded in the 1990s and was started by Pierre Omidyar, who grew up obsessed with computers. Reportedly, Omidyar started eBay after his partner told him she was having trouble finding PEZ candy dispensers to purchase after they moved to Silicon Valley. EBay eventually went on to become a public company, generating $10.7 billion in sales. In 2017, the company claimed nearly 3,000 Australians had become millionaires from their sales on eBay.

Singapore

• Most-used e-commerce app: Carousell
• 34% of respondents in Singapore used app in the last month

Carousell is a marketplace where users can sell anything from beauty products to bikes. As the app is headquartered in Singapore, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that it’s proved so popular in this Southeast Asian country. In 2012, the company was founded by Quek Siu Rui, Lucas Ngoo, and Marcus Tan. A $75 Amazon Kindle was the first product sold on the platform.

In 2021, the company announced it received $100 million from a U.S. investor, bringing its value to $1.1 billion. Carousell can be used in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Portugal

• Most-used e-commerce app: OLX
• 31% of respondents in Portugal used app in the last month
• Other countries where app ranks first: Egypt, Indonesia

OLX is an e-commerce platform that claims to serve more than 300 million people on a monthly basis in more than 30 countries. Similar to Craigslist, app users can do everything from selling used cars to finding jobs. OLX was founded in 2006 and the company, OLX Group, is headquartered in Amsterdam, but has offices all over the world, including in Lisbon, Portugal.

Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford founded the company in 2006, and, by 2014, OLX amassed 200 million users a month. OLX was first launched in India in 2009, then in Brazil the following year. OLX Group draws in about $1.3 billion each year.

Russia

• Most-used e-commerce app: AliExpress
• 27% of respondents in Russia used app in the last month
• Other countries where app ranks first: Nigeria, Israel, Netherlands, Morocco

Like Alipay, AliExpress is an online company owned by the Chinese company Alibaba Group. AliExpress began in 2010 as a marketplace where users all over the world can purchase items at a steep discount, primarily serving the business-to-business community. Currently, the service pivoted to business-to-consumer customer bases and has over 150 million active shoppers, generating revenue in more than 50 countries.

In 2015, the company launched a Russian-language website to increase sales. That same year, the company offered local warehouse services in the country so that sellers could deliver popular items to Russian customers more quickly.

South Africa

• Most used E-commerce app in the country: Gumtree
• 26% of respondents in South Africa used app in the last month

Launched in 2000, Gumtree was the first online classifieds site in the United Kingdom. Its popularity has since expanded to South Africa, where the listings site launched in 2005 for locals to buy, sell, and trade goods. Currently, more than 30,000 new listings are posted a day and the site has more than 3.8 million visitors a month.   

Gumtree is part of Adevinta, a multinational company with offices in Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam that operates online classifieds platforms in more than 15 countries.

New Zealand

• Most used E-commerce app in the country: Trade Me
• 23% of respondents in New Zealand used app in the last month

Whether Kiwis are in the market for a new apartment or a bargain on a used computer, many head over to Trade Me. The app has more than 1.9 million visitors a day for goods and services such as apartments, used cars, vacation rentals, job postings, and more.

The app was launched in 1999 by Sam Morgan, a computer programmer frustrated by the lack of websites that served New Zealanders. By 2003, it had more than 100,000 listings, which has grown to more than 9 million today. Its offices are in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.

Switzerland

• Most-used e-commerce app: Wish
• 19% of respondents in Switzerland used app in the last month
• Other countries where app ranks first: Denmark, Romania, Sweden

A shopping platform that offers services to users all over the world, Wish is a discount e-commerce app headquartered in San Francisco. Wish is similar to companies like eBay and Amazon where users can purchase and sell items at a discount, like brand name tracksuits selling for less than $10 USD.

Former Google engineer and Polish immigrant Peter Szulczewski founded the company, originally operating under the name ContextLogic. Later, Szulczewski invited his friend Danny Zhang onboard, and the two rebranded the company as Wish, though ContextLogic still oversees operations of the company. By 2018, Wish had become the most-downloaded app for shoppers in the world, generating $2.5 billion in 2020.

Taiwan

• Most-used e-commerce app: Buy123
• 15% of respondents in Taiwan used app in the last month

Established in 2013, Buy123 is a business-to-consumer e-commerce platform that uses artificial intelligence to help customers find deals. Buy123 is owned by the KuoBrothers, also known as The Entrepreneur Brothers, and is one of the company’s most successful B2C platforms. The app receives more than 6 million visitors and 32 million page views per month. Users have poured about NT$400 million (about $141 million in U.S. dollars) in transactions on the app. With the KuoBrothers headquartered in Taiwan, Buy123 has the local advantage for its Taiwanese customers and proves to be the most popular in the nation.

Amanda Push

is a writer based in Colorado. Her work has appeared in various publications including LendingTree, Student Loan Hero, CNET, Bankrate, Associated Press, and ValuePenguin.

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This is the reason so many consumers abandon their shopping carts at checkout—online, anyway. Extra fees like taxes and shipping costs added to online purchases make an already painful transaction that much tougher to swallow. Many companies, starting with Amazon, have figured out that offering free shipping is an effective way to offset the pain of paying and usher consumers down the last levels of the e-commerce conversion funnel.

Consumers have come to expect perks like free or fast shipping—both, ideally. Without the guarantee of either, people are unlikely to complete a purchase. And with free shipping came the advent of free returns, and then refunds without returns. These expectations and efforts to mitigate the pain of paying have made us, on the whole, more irrational and wasteful consumers. When we are more inclined to buy because of a perceived no-cost service, we are wasteful at every step along the supply chain.

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated inefficiencies along the supply chain and reinforced bad consumer habits. Practices like bracketing—buying multiple of the same item like pants and returning the unwanted items—wouldn’t be so terrible if the supply chain were designed to function in reverse. However, it is woefully ill-equipped to efficiently process returns.

According to Optoro, a reverse logistics company, roughly 2.9 million tons of returns went into landfills in 2020—not restocked on shelves. With an estimated record $761 billion worth of returned merchandise in 2021—both online and in stores—the environmental impacts of incentivized buying and returning are likely to worsen.

To track how corporate practices and consumer behaviors have changed over time, Smartlook compiled a list of eight important moments and trends in free shipping in the internet age.

Amazon Prime brings unlimited free shipping to the masses

In 2005, Amazon launched Amazon Prime—a $79 annual membership service that provided, among other benefits, free two-day shipping and discounted one-day shipping within the contiguous United States. In early 2022, Prime increased its subscription costs for its more than 140 million U.S. subscribers, bumping the service to $139 per year.

Free shipping is the second most commonly cited reason why people subscribe to Prime, despite the fact that most orders of $25 or more already qualify for free shipping. Roughly 58% of Amazon Prime consumers were more likely to increase their total Amazon order to meet the one-day shipping threshold.

People quickly decide free shipping is the only way

For many shoppers, shipping costs can be the make-or-break factor in a consumer’s decision to complete a sale. According to a 2020 Baymard Institute study, 50% of survey respondents cited extra costs such as shipping as the #1 reason they abandoned their carts during checkout. When looking at European consumers, that number jumps to 65%.

Free shipping can make consumers act irrationally

The very concept of free can lead consumers to make inconsistent or even irrational decisions, as evidenced by behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s free candy experiment. When presented with a choice between a lower quality item that is free, or a higher quality item at a reduced cost—which is potentially the better deal—consumers are far more likely to choose the free item.

Free Shipping Day begins in 2008

Free Shipping Day, launched in 2008, encouraged shoppers to buy from online retailers in mid-December, cashing in on last-minute holiday shoppers and bolstering sales for participating retailers like Target, Pottery Barn, and JCPenney. According to the now-defunct Free Shipping Day organization, Free Shipping Day sales in 2010 exceeded Black Friday online sales by $294 million. The last promoted Free Shipping Day was in 2020.

With free shipping comes free returns

Nearly 21% of all online purchases were returned in 2021—$102 billion worth of merchandise, according to a National Retail Federation survey. But “reverse logistics” or the operations around receiving, processing, and relisting returned items is inefficient, labor-intensive, and more expensive than it’s worth. Many returned items even end up incinerated or in landfills.

Retailers like Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce retailers are now more frequently using artificial intelligence to determine which returns are worth processing, and when a refund without a returned item is more cost-effective.

Free shipping can be damaging to small businesses

Small businesses often lack the resources to sustain and absorb the costs of free shipping and free returns. Just like free shipping, or lack thereof, can be a dealbreaker for a consumer at checkout, it can also be the difference between supporting a small business, and supporting a mega business like Amazon that can afford to provide these perks.

For instance, in 2019, Etsy—a platform full of small retailers with limited scale and resources—announced that retailers who did not offer free shipping on orders of $35 or more would be deprioritized by the platform’s search algorithm.

It can be damaging to the environment as well

Globally, shipping accounts for 2.2% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. If the industry were a country, it would emit as much carbon dioxide as Germany. But it’s not just getting items to their destination that’s a problem.

In addition to returned items sitting in landfills as waste and contributing to carbon dioxide emissions, simply transporting returned inventory generates more than 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to Optoro. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about only 54% of packaging is recycled.

Shipping might still be free, but it’s getting more expensive for retailers

In February 2021, ​​FedEx announced a 30 cent per-package surcharge on Express and domestic residential ground shipments for retail customers with a weekly volume of more than 30,000 packages. These surcharges help shipping companies like FedEx and UPS scale up their operations by hiring more staff or improving infrastructure to keep up with the pace of online retail, which has been supercharged by the restrictions of the pandemic.

In 2020, e-commerce sales rose by 32%. Amid this surge, prices of producing and acquiring packaging materials have also risen significantly.

Lauren Liebhaber

is a Senior Staff Writer for Stacker with a passion for covering breaking news, current events, and local journalism. Though currently based in Salem, Massachusetts, upstate New York will always be where she calls home. Lauren grew up in Clinton, attended St. Lawrence University for undergrad, and The S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communications at Syracuse University for graduate school. Lauren spends all of her free time hanging out with her dog, a Leonberger named Yukon.

The post The rise of free shipping: 8 moments that transformed e-commerce appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Introduction

User Experience has changed a lot in the last decade.

At Smartlook we’re developing a suite of tools to help organizations make better design decisions. For example our website visitor recording tool allows teams to sit down and monitor user behavior in real time. The bottom line impact that this type of technology can have on your company is massive. 

Today we were able to dive deeper into this topic, and many others, because we had the opportunity to chat with, Rich Barret, a creative professional with over 20 years of experience in the design field. Let’s jump into the interview. 

The Interview

Hi Rich, it’s great to have you with us today. You have an impressive career in UX design and strategy,and you’re also an avid writer. How much are design and writing intertwined? Tell us more about this connection. 

Thanks so much for inviting me. I think design and writing complement each other quite a bit. Everyone talks these days about storytelling in UX. I think having a writer’s mentality is useful in thinking about empathy and imagining the peaks and valleys of a user’s journey. More importantly, every designer really needs to have a command of language because it’s helpful in how a designer presents and talks about their work. I work with a team of writers so I don’t usually have to write about a project myself, but I often find myself writing what might as well be a script for some of my presentations beforehand. Even though I rarely follow it all that closely in the end, it helps me a lot to think through the points I want to be sure I hit on.  

On the flipside, every writer I work with is just as much a designer of our project as I am. They’re thinking through all the same things a designer does; they just don’t need to open up Sketch. I also think the things you learn to pay attention to as a designer – the importance of the small details, consistency, simplicity, guiding the user – these are all really useful things for any kind of writer to master.

Really, the lines between writers and designers are going to start to blur soon as we all start designing conversations for AI and voice interfaces.

How is analyzing user behavior affecting the writing and design processes?

I work as the UX Strategist for Ally Bank where we have a really strong group of user researchers who are embedded with the scrum teams and make sure everyone has what they need to understand our users and their expectations. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to either sit in on customer interviews or talk directly with users myself and it’s one of the most valuable things you can do as a designer. Just last week we invited a bunch of customers in to the office to have coffee and take part in some group word association activities that really helped us get a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings they may have when interacting with our services. 

I often equate this part of my job to being a journalist. Going out in the field and getting qualitative research so that you have the proper background to design the right solutions is very much like a journalist interviewing a variety of sources to piece together every angle. We’re all Woodward and Bernstein, trying to break this big story by digging and digging until we uncover some insight that brings it all together.

You are also an illustrator. Your work is stunning. Are you able to draw inspiration back and forth from your illustration work to UX? 

Thank you! I appreciate that. I started my career as an illustrator – or maybe it’s more accurate to say I started my career trying to be an illustrator. It’s what I went to school for, but it’s not an easy field to just make a career at right out of the gate, unless you’ve already developed a strong, unique style that has market appeal. I struggled with this for a while until I had spent some years on the other side of the equation, working for advertising agencies like JWT in NY where we would hire illustrators and photographers. I began to understand what clients are looking for and how illustrations needed to fit into the larger picture of an ad campaign or the design system of a particular brand. It helps so much in any work situation to be able to visualize and empathize with the people behind every aspect of a project. You need that holistic view.

Although in my current role at Ally I’m not doing a lot of hands-on design, I’ve had the opportunity to produce a number of illustrations there. I also continue to do the occasional illustration project for my own clients. I’ve recently illustrated a series of yoga poses for an app called 19 Minute Yoga and a whole bunch of illustrated event promos for NASCAR’s Instagram feed. 

You are also an avid comics fan and author. You have many articles published for Mental Floss, mostly on the subject of comics. What can you tell us about the connection between comics and UX? Where is the crossover here? On the surface they seem like two different worlds. 

It’s a great question and I have to say that I’ve thought about this a lot, since comics and design have been two big parts of my life for a long time now. I’ve moderated a couple of panel discussions at comic book conventions over the years on the subject of “Design in Comics”. When people hear “design” and “comics” they tend to think just about really graphic and simple comic book covers or the elaborate package design of certain graphic novels like Chris Ware’s Building Stories, but comic book artists, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are designing a reading experience that is more complicated than most of the user flows I’ve ever had to design. It’s just that no one calls it “design” and most comic book readers take the whole reading experience for granted. 

There is so much going on in a well-designed comic book page that most readers don’t slow down and notice when they’re caught up in the story. However, they probably notice it when it’s not done well because the pacing just feels off to them. 

A good artist will lead your eye from panel to panel while juggling all kinds of factors such as: aesthetics (is it pleasing to look at?); continuity (do the characters look like themselves from panel to panel? Are the objects in the room from the previous panel still in the same position in this one?); “camera” work (is there a consistent POV from panel to panel so that readers don’t lose track of where the characters are in this space?); composition (do the contours of the figures overlap in a way to create the proper depth and space? Is there room for the word balloons to fit comfortably and be read in proper context to the drawings?). 

And then you get into all the stuff you choose not to show. Everything that happens in the reader’s imagination between panels that fills in the action. There are so many considerations to be made by an artist on every single page and a lot of it comes naturally to the good ones.  

You’ve been quite active in the press, as well. From moderating a Star Wars panel in 2015 to talking about your graphic novel “Nathan Sorry” you’ve been present in a lot of public discussions. Is public speaking a part of your journey you’d like to focus on more in the future? 

My time at Mental Floss, and even the live panels I’ve moderated, really got me interested in learning the art of conducting a good interview. I had the opportunity to interview some big names like Margaret Atwood, Chuck Palahniuk, Mike Mignola and others. I love to hear people talk about their process, what inspires them and the weird trajectories their careers have taken them.

It is interesting having the opportunity to be on both sides of it. I’m probably a little less comfortable on this side, talking about myself, but I do like to share the little things I  know and I think my own career has had enough variety to make it interesting. As you mentioned, I wrote and illustrated my own graphic novel a number of years ago, Nathan Sorry. I was self-publishing it as both a webcomic and a (very) small press print publication. This was around the time that digital comics started to become a thing and I was able to get in on the forefront of those new platforms like Comixology, which is now owned by Amazon. I used to make it a point to talk a lot about what I learned in that process – in social media, online forums and on panels at comic book conventions – because we were all trying to figure out the viability of making and distributing comics this way and sharing what you had figured out made the whole system better for everyone. 

At the moment, you are working for Ally, a financial service provider from the US. What is the impact UX has on the financial sector, and how does UX help out a financial service company up their game? In general do you find FinTech or financial service companies ahead or behind the UX curve? 

I’ve been at Ally for about 6 years now and they’ve always been focused on the importance of UX for as long as I’ve been there, but I do think something has changed in the last couple of years. And I don’t mean just at Ally, but across many companies and different industries. Executives are talking about design more and recognizing its importance. I don’t know if it’s that McKinsey report from last year that measured the business value of design or what, but there’s been a noticeable shift. 

Analytics and A/B testing help too. There have been projects I’ve been involved in where the only thing we changed was the visual design and it resulted in an enormous increase in revenue, which we could directly attribute to the new design. As a designer, even I was taken aback when I would see those numbers. This kind of thing gets noticed and before you know it you have executives sitting in on sprint demos, wanting to understand and by part of the process, and it’s a great thing. 

I think in our industry, the small, disruptive fintechs have really helped our cause in UX. The big banks didn’t seem to put this kind of emphasis on design until apps like Acorns or Chime or N26 came along and suddenly everyone could see how visual design and a delightful user experience could be important. Ally was a disruptor itself to the big banks about ten years ago when it first came on the scene as an online bank, but now I think we’re about to enter a really transformative period in finance where every bank and technology company (hello, Apple) is racing to offer this robust, personalized financial experience. 

Rich, your career is not only impressive, but it has many different elements that are complementing one another. You’ve been freelancing, in addition to working at some major companies. Which one do you prefer and why? 

I think you get into a groove either way. After spending the first decade of my career working in advertising – for both a large global agency and smaller local shops – I worked out of my home as a freelance web designer and illustrator for a few years and it was great. I had three little ones at the time and it was the perfect way to be around for all of those early parenting moments. The work was really steady then and I don’t think I had any intention of taking a full time job again. But freelancing can be a bit of a nail biter and that gets really stressful with a family. Plus, I started to realize there were things I wasn’t learning by not collaborating with a team and not being able to work on large scale projects that enterprise organization provide. It’s hard to be on the cutting edge of new technology when you’re on your own. 

Now, after working for a large company for a while, it’s gotten hard to think about going back to being on my own, but you never know. It’s nice to be in a career that has options.  

We mentioned that there are a lot of technological innovations regarding UX design. What are your thoughts on the impact augmented reality (AR) is making on the UX design? 

I’ll admit that I assumed AR would be relegated to gimmicks and gaming, but I’ve definitely come around to it recently. I especially like the way Ikea and Wayfair have used it to help in the home shopping experience by letting you position a piece of virtual furniture in your room. You can even walk around it in 360 to really get a sense of how it would sit in the space. I still think 90% of the way it will be used by most companies is going to be gimmicky though.

Rich, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. Are there any last words of wisdom that you’d like to share with our readers? 

This has been fun. I don’t have too much wisdom to share, but I think we’re entering some interesting times for the UX industry. AI is going to change almost everything about the products we design and even how we actually create the designs. We’re all going to have to adapt in ways that are hard to predict right now. I think keeping in touch with our personal creativity is going to be even more important.

Ten questions are not enough to explore the achievements and knowledge gained from a twenty year long career. However, in a short span of time, we did manage to learn a lot from you today Rich. Thank you. To our blog readers, if  you’d like to learn more about Rich and his work, you can visit his website here. 

author Nikola Kožuljević

Product & Marketing

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