The eCommerce industry has evolved a great deal over the past few years. We have technological interventions to thank for some of these changes, while a more conscious consumer is responsible for driving the rest of them.
However, innovations and interventions still haven’t come to a halt. You can expect the eCommerce industry to embrace newer ways and get rid of the old ones in the future. We have put together a list of top 7 trends that can help your eCommerce business grow and prosper in the future.
1. AR and VR
Unlike the popular perception, AR and VR are used for a lot more than just gaming and entertainment purposes. eCommerce is one of the sectors that is utilizing these technologies to deliver a much-enhanced user experience to customers.
AR allows customers to get a feel of the product from the comfort of their couch and also while they are one a go. It helps improve the customer satisfaction rate since people now end up with more realistic expectations of the product. It is expected that 100 million customers might use AR this year. The increased penetration of these technologies is another encouraging sign for eCommerce business owners.
Businesses like IKEA and Sephora are perfect examples of all that can be achieved with the correct implementation of this technology. They made the try-before-you-buy option available to customers, which then resulted in improved sales and increased brand popularity.
2. AI
There is probably no other topic hotter than Artificial Intelligence in the tech world right now. It’s no surprise that it branches out into the eCommerce world as well. Whether it be establishing the most efficient delivery routine or predicting market trends to roll out relevant offers, AI can take care of it all.
If it weren’t for artificial intelligence, Amazon would not have been able to change its product prices 2.5 million times a day. One can only imagine how much human resource that would’ve required if it were supposed to happen manually.
Personalization is one of the many useful applications of AI in eCommerce. You can provide shoppers with personalized suggestions and exclusive offers based on their shopping patterns. It will not only leave the customer a lot more satisfied but also help you boost sales. We merely scratched the surface of what you can do with AI in eCommerce. It doesn’t matter if your business is big or small; you need to leverage AI for better output.
3. Payment Methods
Cart abandonment has been haunting eCommerce business owners since time immemorial. Unavailability of the preferred payment method is one of the many reasons people leave the eCommerce portal without buying anything.
There are around 140 online payment methods available as of today. And you need to strive to include as many of them in your eCommerce portal as possible. 50% of shoppers leave an app if they do not find their preferred payment method, and that should be a good enough motivation for you.
User preferences for the payment method vary from region to region and from niche to niche. All you need to do is identify the right Alternative Payment Methods and make them available on your portal. The options can vary right from credit cards to cryptocurrency. The gist is that the customer experience should not take a hit because of the unavailability of the payment methods.
4. Chatbots
Conversational chatbots are elevating customer experience across eCommerce platforms as we speak. Conversational chatbots aren’t synonymous with rolling out canned messages but with providing customers with humane and smarter interactions.
There are 1.4 billion people that are using chatbots as of now. There isn’t an issue of acceptance of this technology at all. Live chat software has a 73% satisfaction rate when it comes to users interacting with businesses.
5. Mobile commerce
The USP of eCommerce has been the fact that it allows shoppers to find and buy products from the comfort of their couch. But there is something even better than that. Shopping while you are on the go, waiting in a queue, in the tube, etc. Mobile commerce gives all these freedoms to users, so it must be pretty easy to guess the reason for its popularity.
It is expected for more than half of online sales going to mobile commerce by 2021. The time is ripe for you to make your business ready for this instrumental shift. Some of the boxes you need to check in the process are making sure the UI/UX is user friendly, the app utilizes the features of the device, and so on. With the mobile commerce side sorted, you can tap into a much bigger user base.
6. Voice search
Voice search is the dark horse of eCommerce technology trends. We guess mainstream voice assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana are to thank for it. Shoppers are now much more comfortable doing a voice search compared to typing in their query.
There are multiple ways you can leverage this trend to your advantage. You can make your catalog a lot more voice search friendly so that people reach your platform when they make a voice search query. The other way is to provide a voice search option within your eCommerce application. Thankfully, both these ways need you to focus on Natural Language Processing, so it should not be much of a big deal to apply both the methods.
7. Headless eCommerce
As eCommerce infrastructures get huge, it becomes increasingly difficult to roll out changes on the frontend. There is so much to take care of at once. And then there is always the possibility of multiple things going wrong. Headless eCommerce presents the solution to this problem by making the frontend relatively independent of the backend. It is at the back of this advantage that it is now trending across the eCommerce ecosystem.
With headless eCommerce architecture, it is possible to manage multiple frontends without making many changes in the backend. The feature allows you to stay at the top of your game and keep up with the constantly changing market trends. You can roll out new offers and campaigns with ease and keep the users satisfied.
These eCommerce technology trends can help you take your business to the next level. You will be able to reach and retain a much larger user base, which would also result in increased sales.
For a more indepth look into the trends you can check out our Future of eCommerce article.
Do you think we missed out any technology trend that is affecting the eCommerce ecosystem? Feel free to share your opinion down in the comments section.
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