Adobe: Retailers failed to meet holiday season demands

While there have been plenty of statistics published in the last few weeks highlighting the elevation of mobile's influence on e-commerce, Adobe is lamenting that retailers still could have done far better during the 2013 holiday season.

The software giant's assessment bears a bit of a contrast to Tuesday's update from the U.S. Department of Commerce, reporting that U.S. consumer spending during the fourth quarter of 2013 was actually better than expected.

However, Adobe's analysis hones in on the window of time from the last week of November through December 25.

Adobe already issued a warning about the potential pitfalls particular to the 2013 holiday season -- namely a shorter window of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas based on the way the calendar shook out.

To put it into a figure everyone can understand, Adobe posits that retailers could be facing up to $1.5 bil­lion in lost revenue just from six fewer days compared to 2012.

There were a number of moving parts at play here beyond just the calendar -- namely that aforementioned habit shift in favor of mobile.

Tyler White, a manager and principal analyst for the Adobe Digital Index, suggested further in a blog post on Monday that this habit has veered towards dependence territory, which retailers might not understand quite yet. There in lies the glaring problem.

Here's more:

Its pos­si­ble that retail­ers and ship­pers also under­es­ti­mated the surge in online shop­ping on Black Fri­day dri­ven by mobile shop­ping. The abun­dance of online shop­ping Thanks­giv­ing Week­end is likely to have insti­gated ship­ping delays and capac­ity over­load which lead to some irri­tated retail­ers and dis­ap­pointed cus­tomers. In 2014, larger retail­ers will seek more con­trol of the ecosytem [sic] to insure cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. Growth in 2014 will depend on rebuild­ing some trust lost this sea­son due to ship­ping delays.

Naturally, Adobe has already has some new digital marketing products in the pipeline to flaunt to retailers, hinting they could help them do better in 2014.

Stemming from last summer's $600 million acquisition of cross-channel specialist Neolane, Adobe is integrating its Campaign and Experience Manager products under the Marketing Cloud umbrella.

Adobe touts that this combination will enable marketers to be able to punch out their content across more verticals at once in real time and at scale across all possible marketing channels. Simply put, it's another way to cover all the bases, which are multiplying frequently with the dawn of each new social media frenzy.

Patrick Tripp, who leads product strategy for cross-channel campaign management at Adobe, quipped in a separate blog post that the two should work together like "chocolate and peanut butter" because of the combination of all these abilities.

Tripp explained:

Regard­less of indus­try, it has always been a major chal­lenge for mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions to cre­ate high qual­ity con­tent, and uti­lize that con­tent all within the same mar­ket­ing tools. Typ­i­cally, mar­keters are forced to work with out­side agen­cies or dis­parate orga­ni­za­tions using man­ual processes, or attempt to lever­age exter­nal con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems that do not allow them exe­cute mes­sages, or eas­ily make changes.

For Adobe's complete holiday shopping report, click through the slideshow below:

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Image via the Adobe Digital Marketing blog