Digital Trends Shaping the Future of E-commerce

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Shopping has been transformed by the e-commerce revolution. It has become an activity that you can do in a few minutes without even changing out of your pajamas. Since its inception, the online shopping experience has changed greatly, and the amount of money and time people spend on it has increased a lot.

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E-commerce booming, but only a small part of retail sales

E-commerce, which just contributed 3.5 percent of retail sales a decade ago, is expected to reach 11.9 percent this year. Normal brick-and-mortar stores remain the dominant venue for shopping. With more space available in the online marketplace, there is enormous opportunity for others to try their business and gain benefits through e-commerce development services.

It’s important for business owners to take a look around and see which businesses are growing in their surroundings, track down the ones customers like best, and look for ways to get ahead in business as well as life. It is important for the businesses to look for ways to optimize their in-store customer experience to match with e-commerce expressions.

Some online businesses are coming up with physical stores, just as brick-and-mortar retailers are building digital stores. This helps them to offer better shopping experience to their customers.

Mobile e-commerce to grow strong

How does shopping for a product using a mobile device and having it delivered in no time sound? This is the era of mobile commerce, and it is really one of those awesome e-commerce trends. Consumers are finding this method better and easy to use, which has led to significant growth in e-commerce sales. By 2021, mobile is expected to take up 45 percent of all e-commerce sales. With the use of smartphones increasing around the world and not fading away anytime soon, they will play a major role in sales over the years.

If you wish to stay ahead of the mobile curve, you need to develop a website optimized for mobile. It is a fact that less conversions are made on mobile phones than on desktop. This can be taken care with a better mobile checkout process. With how small mobile screens are, people find it harder to find all the information they are looking for. Finding the right payment option is another matter of concern. Above all, customers are not happy filling in all fields within that small screen. So make it a point to keep the checkout as simple as possible.

Be ready to welcome new buyers

There will be more sales in the coming years as more and more people shop online. It is expected that by 2019 there will be more than 2 billion shoppers online.

In the coming years there will come a situation where consumers and users across the world will anxiously wait for the brands to come to them. With the BRIC countries growing in terms of economy, eCommerce sales is expected to grow too. With less than 50% online shopping options available in these countries, there is better hope for brands to reach new avenues through eCommerce development.

It has been seen that new set of online buyers are getting formed in Latin America, Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. So it is time for you to think about what products and services can appeal them and what should be your tactics to reach them. If you manage to find answers for these questions then you can build a new set of loyal customers.

Customer-friendly policies are a must

In case of retail market, competition is very high and things become more amplified when it is about the internet market. For online shoppers, they have the idea that they have enough places to look for the product they want if you fail to offer them exactly the same thing. Most of the online shoppers of these days spend enough time online for research before they plan to shop and so competition can play a crucial role when it comes to tracking the best deals.

The best way for the brands to attract and make customers pay, is by offering features, which were not considered as mainstream back. It has been seen that majority of the shoppers leave the site or abandon shopping cart just for the reasons that the product don’t come with free shipping or the products cannot be returned easily. With more limelight on consumers for the process of buying, offering customer-friendly policies is the only way out.

Ads are making way out

For the matter of fact, users were never fond of the ads on the websites. The young group of shoppers have already found a way to get rid of them by making use of ad blockers. This act itself point to the fact that the shoppers don’t find the bombardment of ads as pleasing anymore.

Marketers around the world need to be known about the fact that more than half of the consumers who are on the website turn off the ads if they want to access the content. In case the content is held back due to ad blockers, the users might disable them but, on their mind they always block ads.

So let’s change things for advertising altogether. Ads have always been despised and now you can just change the basic thing and work towards making them worth watching and viewing. By making use of the ad formats that are native, we can work towards saving the consumers from having bad experiences with ads. There should be provisions to allow users to skip ads which will increase an inclination towards ads in the minds of the users. At the end it is about creating ads which can keep the users hooked up to it.

Be ready for cross-platform experience if you want to make a sale

From the consumer perspective, they have much in front of them offered in different ways. They know what they want to buy and have options to choose from in terms of products and places. Some of the consumers visit stores to check for products, check for online sales and offers on mobile phones and finally purchase it from the website. For them moving from stores to devices is not a big deal and if you want to keep up with them, you need to upgrade too. With people moving across different devices for online transactions, it is important to come up with marketing tricks which work across different channels. You should think about branding techniques which wok across different social media platforms and on different devices, capable to offer consistent journeys to the customers throughout the campaign.

If you have not done today then you will have to set up analytics which helps to track customer activities across different channels in the future. If you just stick to one source, chances are more that you will not get back the right marketing effectiveness. You need to ensure your marketing campaigns are focused on different channels and consumers can easily find you, only then you will be able to track down the marketing performance.

Amazon all set to dominate our lives

It is said that within a few years of span, Amazon will influence our lives greatly online and offline. Amazon has already managed to come up with a number of brick and mortar stores like bookstores, grocery store like Amazon Go and pop-up retail stores. When we talk about Amazon Go, it is a grocery store with its own peculiarity where you will be able to buy products and make transactions using sensors and apps. There will be no grocers at the store! It is called as the future of offline shopping model where paying for something takes place smoothly.

Again, Amazon is planning to come up with decentralized warehouses unlike the ones it has now to make sure the shipping of products take place even quicker. With time people have grown to be more impatient and the kind of new shipping that Amazon plans to experiment will make it possible to deliver products within 30 minutes using drones. Other businesses especially the restaurants will mostly follow the idea to improve their delivery services.

With large number of products hitting the market every year, thinking about cutting down the size and number of warehouses can seem to be unpleasant step. It will be possible to take care of storage and inventory management in better way by making use of 3D scanning and printing. In couple of years the 3D printing capabilities will become best from better which will allow the retailers to print on demand inventory. This means there will be no need to stock large quantities of products in store and give the message of “out of stock” when it is out of inventory. Again, all this can only become practical when you choose right eCommerce development company for the job.

Shopping experience will be completely different

Today shoppers have a better idea about the things that they plan to shop. During the festive sales of previous year, majority of the shoppers were seen spending time more online to check prices, read reviews, find discounts and all – before making the actual purchase in-store. Even after more online purchasing opportunities available to the consumers across the globe, more people are concentrated towards shopping offline by seeing the product, touching and feeling it before actually spending money.

For those people who are into webroom, in-store shopping experience can be made easier by taking up some logical steps. The products can be made available for the consumers to test on their own or even made them available to purchase when they are at the store. It is even possible to make use of augmented reality capabilities to help the consumers towards finding the product that they are looking for. For those shoppers who are not into research work before making the purchase, augmented reality helps them to find the best deals when they are just visiting the store.

Apart from improving online shopping experience, augmented reality will ensure to make lesser stops at the store to purchase those items that we are not planning to buy online. For example, people without conventional body type can have a hard time choosing and buying dresses online. In the coming future there will be better scenario where the shoppers will be able to add in the measurements of their body and simply try out the dresses virtually before actually buying them. This will help to save the embarrassment they face when shopping online and then returning them back just because it does not suit them well.

Wrapping it

Offline shopping experience is not going to end completely rather it will take a few twists and turns with time and survive. When it comes to digital eCommerce it will improve, it will grow – all just to suit the best interest of the shoppers. The use of virtual shopping experience, use of augmented reality, chatbot for customer service, use of social media platforms for eCommerce and others, will contribute towards developing another level of digital eCommerce. They all will play a crucial role in moulding and shaping the future of eCommerce.

Vikrant Bhalodia
An Avid Writer by nature. People Ops & Marketing Strategist: Leader with 15+ years of experience in Organizational Capability Building and Marketing Success. Having passion towards technology and with multi-functional experience at WeblineIndia, a leading Software Development Company based in USA and India, Vikrant loves sharing insights on optimizing the success and internet visibility of the customers’ businesses.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Great article. We (https://leadsrx.com/) agree with all the ideas mentioned. A few things stand out to us as we analyze data for over 14,000 websites, online to offline will be the most important piece to e-commerce, especially when it comes to advertising for D2C companies. Using attribution to tie together offline to online ad channels will be paramount especially as e-comm companies see the value in advertising on broadcast radio.
    Being cross-platform ready with analytics is a must, especially in a competitive market like retail or travel. Gone are the days of coming to the website and making a purchase without comparative shopping. As segments grow, consumers are doing more and more research and will find you through various channels and platforms. Analytics to show which platforms, channels and influencers are a must if you’re going to allocate your marketing spend correctly.

  2. Yes that’s correct. Analytics is important to understand the customer behavior on your site and help the website owners decide where to spend money, what needs to be optimized. Also you mentioned about comparative research, I feel Reputation management will be the key to have an edge over the competitors. But reputation is something which cannot be built overnight, it is a long term thing where customer experience is the key.

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