How Certain Growth Trends Will Impact Ecommerce In The Future
The world of ecommerce is growing at a rapid rate and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down anytime soon. New changes appear each year that can assist businesses or challenge them in a unique way.
Due to the pandemic, consumer behavior changed as new waves of digital transformation were seen. This created new challenges for pretty much all types of businesses across the globe. In the case of ecommerce businesses, they will need to learn these new challenges in order to keep up with the up-and-coming trends over the next few years and so on.
In this article, you will learn about the most popular growth trends that can help with new ideas, solve certain issues, and prepare you to take your ecommerce business to new heights!
Shopping Will Be Done Through Multiple Channels
The digital world is becoming the go-to space for consumers when it comes to shopping, as compared to physical locations. According to studies, 73% of consumers use more than one channel whenever they decide to shop.
So, what does this mean for ecommerce businesses? These businesses will need to understand the shopping patterns of their customers, the marketing channels they prefer using, and what motivates them to make a purchase. To put it simply, you would need to decode where, what, why, when, and how your customers buy your products on a certain channel.
Moreover, there are several ways through which multi-channel shopping works. For example, a potential customer will do research for the product they want to buy online, and afterwards purchase it from the store. On the other hand, a potential customer could first buy the product online, and then pick it up from the store. When your customers utilize more channels, there are increased chances of a higher average order value. On average, customers that utilize more than four shopping channels end up spending 9% more while shopping in a store, as compared to customers that use only one channel.
All of these touch points are very important since they are pieces of puzzles that will help create the complete picture. When you understand the touch points of your customers even before they make a purchase, you will be better able to promote your products/services and handle your marketing budget. You can create well-situated purchase touchpoints for the customers who generally do research online and purchase the product offline. Also, you can take advantage of the click and collect strategy through which shoppers make their purchases online and then pick up their purchase from a store that’s nearby to them. Your online and offline data needs to be in-sync for this to work so that you will receive a faster and more detailed business decision.
Social Media Shopping Is Getting Popular
Nowadays, advertising on Instagram, Facebook, or other social platforms can be utilized in numerous ways. The selling capabilities of social media has greatly improved, hence customers can easily and conveniently purchase products on social media platforms.
Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest are some of the social media channels that introduced the “Buy” button and significantly improved their social selling features. Instagram, for example, launched a ‘Shoppable Post’ feature that helps brands to activate product tags within their posts and add product stickers within the stories. So, when a customer clicks on the product sticker in a story or a product tag in a post, they will see:
- The product’s image.
- The product’s description.
- The cost of the product.
- A link to buy the product.
Thanks to this ecommerce trend, shoppers save a lot of time while purchasing through social media, which helps them to shop in a productive manner. A lot of businesses are adopting this strategy on their social media platforms. Hence, this is the perfect time to turn your social media posts into a social selling point and come up with unique ways through which you can bump up your presence on your socials.
Shoppers Are Purchasing Products Internationally
International shopping has been on the rise as more shoppers look for products outside their country. In addition to ensuring that you have strengthened your ecommerce presence on a global level, make sure to invest in technologies and infrastructures that will help your business to conveniently adapt to overseas buyers.
Personalization In Ecommerce Is Becoming A Standard
In the past few years, ecommerce personalization turned into a massive trend among many businesses. However, in 2021 and the coming years, this will no longer be a mere trend. Customers expect their brands to cater to them personally; hence personalization is turning into an ecommerce standard.
Over the years, personalization has seen a lot of advancement as a marketing strategy. It started with acknowledging customers by their names, however that has greatly changed. Nowadays, ecommerce personalization includes following a customer’s shopping pattern and displaying different products based on that. This is possible by analyzing shopping history, noticing the demographic that does the shopping, observing browsing behavior, and other important data.
Furthermore, there are numerous ways through which ecommerce personalization can be implemented. For example, creating targeted cart recommendations will show the shoppers other related products that they can purchase with the ones they already added into their carts. This can be done by utilizing the automation tool from Personalized Recommendations, which helps in creating relevant product recommendations on your customer’s shopping cart page.
The Rise Of Voice Commerce
Voice technology has been on the rise in the world of ecommerce. The use of different voice devices, like Google Home and Amazon Echo, has changed the way through which people are now interacting with brands by using voice-activated online browsing. Hence, this has resulted in the rise of voice commerce. The term ‘voice commerce’ is used when a transaction between a brand and a customer takes place through a voice device. This has created a new channel through which ecommerce businesses can sell their products/services and grow their brand.
An Increase In New Payment Options Is Seen
How easily a customer can pay for their purchase is what will make them move ahead with the transaction. If a customer’s preferred payment option is not available on your website, they won’t shop from your online store. Hence, it is important to include as many payment options as you can on your website. At the moment, PayPal, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or Apple Pay are usually used by ecommerce businesses. All of these digital services make it easy for people to buy whatever they want via electronic transactions, which allows for a more trouble-free shopping experience. Currently, cryptocurrencies are used when it comes to large business transactions. Naturally, as the need for more payment options increase, certain ecommerce platforms have created their own payment options for their consumers. The perfect example of that is Shopify and ShopBase. They have introduced Shopify Payments and ShopBase Payments in addition to having the option to pay through other channels like PayPal, Stripe, etc. There is no need to depend on third party payment channels anymore. If your store is based out of Shopify or ShopBase, these solutions seem as the better alternatives.
The New Future
The vast world of ecommerce is expanding quickly. Due to the massive increase in global consumers, the rise of social media users, and the constant advancement of technology and infrastructure, ecommerce has a bright future to look forward to. These growth trends are just the beginning as the coming years will introduce new trends that will take your ecommerce business to new heights.