It’s December 31, 2019, I’m in Limassol, and it’s warmer outside than New Year’s Eve has any right to be. I made myself a coffee and, instead of the usual list of resolutions, tried to answer a harder question: what actually changed online over the past ten years? Not what was trendy, but what changed the way business gets done.
I lived through the whole decade from the inside. I started Floria (an online flower shop) in 2009, in the middle of the crisis, ran Știri de Bine (a Romanian good-news site) from 2009 to 2016, built Retargeting, a marketing automation platform for online stores, from 2013 until I left it last year, and in March I launched IconicMan. Somewhere along the way I moved to Cyprus. So what follows isn’t a consultant’s analysis. It’s the view of someone who paid the tuition fee for every one of these shifts.
The phone swallowed everything
In 2010, a “website” was something you opened on a computer, usually at the office. Smartphones existed, but they were an expensive toy. Today almost everyone in Romania carries a phone with internet in their pocket, and mobile data has become fast and cheap, often better than in much richer countries. For an online store that changed everything: design, speed, the checkout form, even the way you write a product description. If in 2019 you still design your site for desktop and then “adapt” it for mobile, you’ve already lost half your customers without ever finding out why.
Social media became the front door
At the start of the decade, Facebook was where you played games and handed out likes. By the middle of it, it had become the main distribution channel for content. I felt it directly at Știri de Bine: traffic no longer came from search or loyal readers, but from whatever the algorithm decided to show. Then came Instagram, bought by Facebook, which moved attention from text to images, and now to stories, content that vanishes after 24 hours. My lesson: don’t build a business on someone else’s land without a plan B. Your email list is yours. Your Facebook page isn’t.
From free SEO to the Google-Facebook duopoly
In 2010, a well-optimized store could grow almost entirely on organic search. Today the same keywords are covered in ads, and organic reach on Facebook has melted away. In practice, two companies now take the lion’s share of online ad budgets. A few years ago I wrote about the Facebook Ads or Google AdWords dilemma, and the answer still stands: both, but with the numbers in front of you. Paid acquisition isn’t bad in itself. It becomes dangerous when the cost of a new customer grows faster than that customer’s value.
Romanian e-commerce grew up, but still pays cash
Online retail in Romania grew enormously this decade. Black Friday went from an imported curiosity to the biggest sales event of the year. Courier companies multiplied, delivery got faster, and people now buy online things they would never have ordered ten years ago without touching them first. And yet Romanians still mostly pay cash on delivery. Card payments are growing, but slowly. That says something about trust, not about technology.
Something else appeared too: the marketplace. The big platforms opened their storefronts to other sellers, and for many small shops that was both an opportunity and a trap. You sell more, but the customer belongs to the platform, not to you.
SaaS, automation and data
Ten years ago, if you wanted personalized recommendations or automatic emails after an abandoned cart, you needed a team of developers. Today you rent them by the month, as a service. That’s exactly the bet we made with Retargeting in 2013, and by now marketing automation is no longer a luxury even for small stores. Software as a service democratized tools that used to be reserved for the big players. The less pleasant part: everyone has the same tools now, so the edge no longer comes from the tool, but from how you use it.
With data came the bill. GDPR, which took effect in May 2018, forced everyone to ask what data they collect and why. Back then I wrote a practical guide for online stores, and I still believe that, beyond the panic and the cookie banners, it was a necessary correction. Customer trust is worth more than one more field in your database.
Messaging, video and the on-demand economy
A few smaller shifts that, together, changed the way we live:
- Messaging apps, WhatsApp, Messenger and others, have largely replaced SMS and a good part of email for quick conversations. More and more customers want to message a store, not call it.
- Video went from “nice to have” to mandatory. For many people YouTube became the second search engine, and stories turned video into something daily rather than a production.
- The on-demand economy reached Romania too. Uber launched in Bucharest in 2015, followed by food delivery and a long list of app-based services. People got used to pressing a button and getting something within minutes.
- Crypto had its moment of hysteria at the end of 2017, when Bitcoin came close to 20,000 dollars and then crashed. When I looked at it at above 4,000 dollars, it already felt like a fever. The underlying technology is still interesting, but the hype cost a lot of people real money.
What didn’t change at all
Now the part I think matters most. After ten years of revolutions, customers want exactly what they wanted in 2010: to trust you, to be treated well, and to get what they ordered, on time. At Floria I learned that on day one: no campaign, however clever, can save flowers that arrived late. The channels changed, the tools changed, the costs changed. A kept promise remains the only ad that never gets more expensive.
What I expect from the 2020s
I’m not making precise predictions, because the past decade taught me that almost all precise predictions are wrong. I just have a few modest expectations. I think artificial intelligence will matter more and more, especially in how we choose products and content, even if we don’t yet know exactly what that will look like. I think data privacy will become a selling point, not just a legal obligation. And I think the companies that win will be, as usual, the ones that keep their promises.
Happy New Year, and here’s to a decade with less noise and more things done well. What do you think really changed online over these ten years, and what did nothing change at all?