The eCommerce business sales have boosted over the years and in 2017 itself it made revenue of around $2.290 trillion. Again by 2021, it is expected that the retail eCommerce sales will reach by $4.479 trillion. Even though digital commerce has developed significantly, there is still enough potential left of the platform and that can be used for future eCommerce businesses growth.
The eCommerce market is developing and spreading towards the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. With the introduction of new technologies and reliability of best eCommerce development services, there will be a great shift in the way online business is carried out.
There are a number of eCommerce trends which small and medium-sized businesses should look for to help the online business grow. The top eCommerce trends are:
Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics
Currently, predictive analytics is considered a hot trend and is an exciting area to watch for. It comes with a number of different statistical techniques which can be used to analyze historical and current data to generate predictions about events that take place in the future. For sure you must have heard about Big Data which is all about dealing with large sets of complex data that is not dealt with by traditional data processing systems.
Even if it seems complex, Predictive Analytics offers the owner of brochure or eCommerce website owner and marketer with the power to predict the actions of the customer and to deal with automation when needed. To achieve that you don’t need to have special skills as you will easily find tools which can help you with it.
If you take the example of email marketing you will see that predictive analytics helps you find the best time which can prove to be effective to send emails to your clients. This has been done by crunching data like opening rates, conversion rates, and engagement rates.
It becomes possible to know what your customer wants – when and where by crunching the data of the customer. This kind of step helps you to be proactive and offer the customer what they want at the time when they want it. This helps you add value to them. You get to improve your targeting skills by making use of machine learning with predictive analytics and the cycle will start all over again.
Artificial intelligence offers the function called as dynamic personalization which helps it to understand the demographics and habits of the customer based on the customer data. Automated emails are generated using the power of AI system and it comes with subject lines and content. Today a large number of emails that land in our inbox comes with subject lines which are generated by AI bots.
In the coming years, there will be a number of eCommerce sites following the trend and joining hands with Predictive Analytics and AI for business growth. This means if you are still to explore this area, it is time you do it for your business.
Website Based on Artificial Intelligence with Voice Search
At one of the eCommerce expo, a company came up with a website which is capable to generate content on its own by the result obtained from first searches for the homepage by visitor, text entry via keyboard or voice search. Artificial intelligence is responsible for displaying everything that the user sees on the website.
This is where the term- ”dynamic content” comes into the picture. Here, instead of displaying the content based on what the user would like to see, content is kept changeable. Based on the first search of the user, the content is displayed accordingly.
By putting artificial intelligence to use this way, the website will be able to offer a different experience to the users. It will become possible to offer a better user experience to the visitors than what is done by a standard website. It can be called as a promising trend in eCommerce industry in the coming years.
This means if a visitor is looking for “new white crop tops” then the website will come up with just content that matches the search and the content would be regarding the trends and styles of crop tops and related fashion.
This can be called as the height of personalization. The user only sees what they want while the marketers can be happy as they will be showing exactly the thing that the user intends to see. Some may say that this can be achieved by making use of the search bar available on the website but, all the visitors do not make use of it.
By the availability of such kind of information, re-targeting customers become effective and accurate for customers and the follow-ups can turn out to be more personalized. This can help the business with better conversion rates through improved engagement.
Building dynamic website may not be an impossible thing in the future. With some efforts, there will be websites offering dynamic content to the visitors.
Voice Search
Voice search and voice recognition have now turned out to be an impressive trend in the market. The technology has already turned out to be strong with a large number of investments coming from tech firms and by achieving a 95% accuracy rate. The next thing you can do with it is to integrate the technology into website design and eCommerce area.
Subscription-Based Business Models
In recent years, the subscription-based commerce business has managed to get a lot of attention and the main reason behind it is its increasing success. For the consumers who are in their twenties have a higher amount of disposable incomes compared to what was twenty years back. But the amount of wealth is less and so the one-off purchases are done less. In a couple of years, the subscription-based businesses will increase more in numbers and they will take up the share of success it can offer.
For many consumers, the excitement of receiving monthly product or service, and the ease to monthly automate the payment can prove to be enticing. For the shoppers of today, they are more driven by personalized experience rather than making the generic purchase of homes and cars.
For the younger generation, they are more inclined towards “experience-first” thinking and this has led to the development of many startups. Again, the companies which offer subscription-based deliveries to the doorstep of the customer are gaining momentum. For the customers, getting a subscription-based delivery every month creates an addictive buzz, fun and quirky feeling when a new parcel arrive at home or office every month.
The ease of service that such business offers also makes them the favorite of the shoppers especially to those who hate going on shopping over the weekend or find it hard to juggle between work and family affairs. The subscription-based business succeeds based on the time saved for customers as well as the hard work they put up. Now, this is something that shoppers cannot neglect.
For such subscription-based business, they have a hard time maintaining variety with each monthly send out as well as to maintain a sense of value. They need to have the best understanding of the target market for strong idea generation.
Still, it has to be noted that if you manage to bring up a subscription element in your business, you have a better chance to expand your business and make great revenue. Just be sure you find right eCommerce development company for the job.
Social Selling
Some kind of integration or eCommerce platform is offered by most of the big names in social media. By keeping in mind the power of social networking, it does not come as a surprise. The social media users are ever increasing and by 2020, the number is going to reach 2.95 billion.
Social media is trying to make the platform easier for the eCommerce stores to go with the trend and have contributed in their individual ways towards it. You will find “buy” button for Facebook users while “shop now” is added by Instagram, Twitter comes with product pages for launched products while Snap chat is working on to build its own eCommerce platform.
For eCommerce sites, social selling is really a thing of excitement and they are undergoing constant changes to get on the top of the list. In order to make high levels of revenue, paid advertisements and eCommerce is playing a major role for companies like Facebook. This means just like the brands compete with each other on the platform like Facebook, it becomes important for them to stay competitive too.
If we talk about 2017 Q3, Facebook managed to gain $10.14 billion revenue just through advertising; by 16% there has been an increase in the number of daily active users in September 2017. From the total revenue earned, 88% belonged to mobile advertising. This alone proves the fact that big companies look to social media platforms as the best place to find a large number of potential customers.
Multiple user targeting options to attract users are offered by such social media to any business. Some of the factors which have been taken care are high engagement rates, high level of customization, detailed reporting, high level of consumer reach and profitable conversion rates.
If you have an eCommerce business then it would be wise of you to connect with your social media accounts to make your sales making efforts more worthy. When going through the social media site, if a user feels to leave the page to buy a product, then it can create a problem. Such kind of increased problems can decrease conversion rates. This is the reason why the websites that are not well designed face the issues related with lower conversion rates.
When you remove the issues that are related to buying a product, the user will be able to buy the product directly without having to leave the page and make use of wallet like Apple Pay to make payment. The shoppers who are more prone to make impulse buys will find it quite easy.
In a couple of years, more number of brands will understand the need to do more than just running shopping ads on Google. It will become important to find the right kind of audience for Instagram ads, Facebook ads and for other important social media accounts. The ease to set up social accounts and to track revenue generated from them improve, more brands will get into it increasing competition.
Chatbots and Private Messaging
Business runs with people and so they have to be there where the people are. So with more people moving towards private messaging, businesses have to do so. When we talk of private messaging, Facebook messenger, Whats App and Snap chat have a large number of users.
So, businesses are taking the step of using Chatbots on such platforms for answering user queries, offering discounts, making product recommendations, replying to questions, etc. Here instead of the human, artificial intelligence technology is working on to connect with the users.
Such kind of computerized live chat system has worked well for all size and kind of eCommerce sites and this trend has been picked up by all the eCommerce stores which are looking for ways to get ahead of the competition. With time this automation will be refined by the use of machine learning.
Such apps will work to revert quickly and offer tailored products to the users instantly as the main purpose of such messaging apps is to bridge the gap between automation and Personalization.
