I know what you’re thinking – another year, another trends article! But taking stock (if you’ll forgive the retail pun) of industry stats and facts as we race further into another year of selling online makes sense. The online landscape is constantly evolving as technology and consumer trends mature side by side, and recent years have seen the maturing of exciting developments, such as voice assistants, chatbots and image recognition software.
At the same time, perennial concerns about customer experience, brand value and differentiation still hold true. But when all is said and done, only the brands that are fully engaged with the here and now will live to tell the tale in 2019.
Mobile commerce is no new thing — mobile traffic surpassed desktop in the UK just over a year ago — and it’s worth noting the continuing importance of m-commerce.
Now, e-commerce companies aren’t just looking to squeeze their websites onto smaller mobile screens, they are actually looking to design websites that are built primarily for mobile phones.
As the consumer appetite for multiple shopping apps doesn’t seem to be materialising (people are tending to consolidate their time by using a few key apps instead), it’s in the mobile browser and messaging apps that we will be seeing e-commerce results.
The increasing sophistication of the online mobile experience is also giving rise to a whole host of new challenges for e-commerce brands. Mobile speed, user experience (UX), mobile SEO — all these have a massive impact on sales figures, with marketing managers and e-commerce brands often lacking a comprehensive plan of attack for mobile.
And now, voice commerce is also looming on the horizon. The rate of adoption for voice search means that 50% of searches could be voice searches by 2020 (says ComScore) — opening up a whole set of new challenges for e-commerce content creators.
The explosion of cryptocurrency is currently hogging fintech conversations, but it’s not the only exciting trend to look out for. Slowly but surely, digital payments have been creeping up, as consumers are able to spend their money online faster and more securely than ever before.
According to the World Payments Report, digital payments across the globe are predicted to increase by an average of 10.9 per cent through to 2020, eventually reaching nearly 726 billion transactions.
The increased sophistication of digital wallet systems and online payment portals means that people will be more and more comfortable with the concept of digital currency, which on the whole is great news for e-commerce brands.
Social commerce is nothing new, but better artificial intelligence (AI) tech means that the experience for customers is improving all the time. Now, customers can upload images of what they’d like to buy via Pinterest Lens, order pizza through Messenger and apply for credit cards or manage their finances via a chatbot.
And for brands, there is huge scope to be at the forefront of the chatbot market, by creating ones that are useful for the consumer: for example, offer product sizing help via chat . . . or let consumers manage their deliveries via Messenger.
For the smartphone generation, it’s a much more natural medium than email. And for brands, emojis and and a less formal customer service style can help humanise brand communications.
Anyone and everyone can build an online store and start selling online — and more and more people are taking advantage of this opportunity. Retailers who would have traditionally only had success on a very small scale if they stuck to one primary location, can open up their store to the entire world. Brand advocates can get passionate about a store that’s halfway around the world and that they’ve never visited.
And with easy-to use marketplaces such as Exchange, Shopify’s e-commerce business marketplace – there is an opportunity for people to actually trade in their e-commerce businesses and sell them on for profit, or snap up profitable stores and take over. For more and more of us, e-commerce is becoming our primary business model.
Price has always been a core customer concern, but the shopping experience and delivery are muscling in as the No 1 priorities. Sometimes, paying a little more to get something sooner and saving time are actually more important than price.
Amazon Prime proved that subscription delivery models do work, but it has also faced intense scrutiny over the ‘Prime promise’. Prime customers were recently up in arms over misleading “next day delivery” marketing, so it’s definitely an issue brands have to be consider carefully. A bad delivery experience is likely to leave an unpleasant taste in a customer’s mouth for a long time.
And when it comes to waiting — customers can be pretty impatient. Poor communication about deliveries and unsuccessful integrations with delivery companies cost smaller e-commerce companies a lot of money in man hours and lost sales.
Brands are finding it harder and harder to map the customer journey onto a strictly linear timeline. As the shopping experience becomes ever more complex in a web of AI and affiliates, brands need to quickly collate customer data and react accordingly.
Personalisation, localisation, content marketing and the subscription model are just some of the ways that brands can try to address a potential lacklustre customer experience. If you can provide customers with something new that they can’t get anywhere else, they will be more likely to remain loyal to you.
In e-commerce, nothing stays the same for long and competition is fierce. Did anyone see that Amazon tried to stamp out Etsy with its new Amazon Handmade?
The battle for shoppers is intense and the gloves are off. If you can build it — build it. Because if you don’t, someone else will.
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Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on e-commerce and how companies can improve the way they represent their brand. She is passionate about using her experience to help brands improve their reach.
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