by Mateusz Gordon, International Ecommerce Segment Manager at Gemius

Event and success of the year

On September 19th, 2014 the biggest IPO in history took place. Alibaba Group went public and collected USD25 billion from investors. This event is not only showing the importance of e-commerce sector for the global economy, it also brings huge capital to be reinvested in the sector. We can expect strong geographical expansion of Alibaba Group towards America, Europe and Africa. Jack Ma’s mission is to help small entrepreneurs to grow, so Alibaba’s IPO will be followed by a cascade of start-ups.

Another success of the year in my opinion is the launch of the best-selling device ever on Amazon: Fire TV stick. This goes perfectly in line with the omnichannel consumer journey trend and on-demand content consumption on TV screen is just the beginning.

Disappointment of the year

Although in the developed markets, the total number of page views generated through the mobile channel exceeded the ones generated through PC, only ca. 5 per cent of orders are completed through smartphone. This shows a huge space for improvement in mobile user experience on all fields: WWW, applications and devices themselves.

Personality of the year

Jack Ma. Him and the vice chairman Joseph Tsai are the only two executives in Alibaba Group that unloaded a significant amount of stock in the IPO. To Jack Ma alone this operation brought almost USD1billion. After IPO Ma still owns over a 7 per cent stake in Alibaba and over 50% in AliPay. All together it makes him the richest person in China. Rejected by KFC, the former English teacher with a salary of USD12 a month now is worth USD25billion. But it’s not only the money that makes him the man of the year: it’s his approach to his fortune: “When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have — it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others” said Ma. Alibaba will become a kind of incubator for ideas changing the world for the better, thanks to such people as Jack Ma, the China’s polluted environment got a second chance.

Trend of the year

Omnichannel consumer journey. Even within one buying process, consumers are switching between devices. In the end, client really doesn’t care which device he/she is using, what they care about is convenience.

Prediction for 2015

Smart TV shopping. Thanks to new generations of devices like Fire Stick TV, Apple TV, etc. more shopping journeys will take its place on TV Screen.