So far, 2019 has been another successful year for the world of Ecommerce. As what seems to be an impressive year for online retailers and services, it opens the question around what lies in store for 2020.
Although 2020 may seem a while off, as a business owner, you need to be constantly thinking about the future. You don’t want to be the only business left behind, after all. You, in fact, want to be ahead of the game and ensure that you are taking advantage of the biggest and most successful trends for E-commerce businesses. Here is everything you need to incorporate into your business to help you grow into 2020.
More available data and analytics
Currently, big data and analytics are transforming all types of industries. E-commerce will continue to strengthen its omni-channel platform offerings, ensuring that almost every action a user makes online can be turned into data.
So ensuring you are taking advantage of the latest available data and analytics available will provide you with the sharpest set of data, which will tell you more about your target customer base. For example, you could take your raw data and make a custom google map to see where your customers are. With increased analytics into customer behavior, businesses, such as yours, will be able to attend to customers’ demand, offering the most personalized customer experience to date.
As we can see from 2019 ecommerce trends, environment topics are currently a huge influencer in customers buying habits. It’s worth keeping an eye on these types of customer habits and consumer trends to influencer the way businesses shape themselves for the future.
Direct customer approach
2018 and 2019 have been the two key years where video marketing has boomed. Videos provide users with a much greater visual impact than text or images.Promotional campaigns via shareable video content will become a priority across marketing plans, visually drawing customers into what can look like another dimension.
Ecommerce will also be taking on aspects of video calling and live chat, in a bid to give customers a more direct and personal service. The chatbot service is being introduced to businesses at a faster than ever rate, improving communication mechanisms. This makes customer service and dealing with the demands of customers more efficient and direct.
Revamped Product Images
When operating an e-commerce website your products must look the best. Emulating the quality of your goods is made possible with high-quality images. Consumers are unable to feel the product in their hands, so it is our job as business owners to make it feel like they are, with the content on our websites. Whether you want to do this in-house or utilize background removal services and photo editors, all can be made simple, while driving more sales.
Voice assistants
The growth of voice assistants has been phenomenal over the past couple of years. Digital assistants started off with Apple’s Siri and have exploded into home devices, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, assisting people with their day-to-day lives.
The popularity and success of these have encouraged voice assistants to permanently come into our ecommerce world. The rise of voice assistants is strongly influencing ecommerce sectors, especially the retail industry. Retailers are working on innovative ways to make voice activation encourage people to make stress-free purchases. With this in mind, expect the keyboard and mouse systems we rely on for our computers to slowly phase out.
By next year, expect to see more outlets allowing customers to research into products they like, make payments and even check over their balances via voice assistant applications.
Pay later options
We’re all familiar with those cart abandonment emails, which remind us that we were kind of interested in an item for a while, but not enough to actually part money with it. This is one of the biggest reasons for revenue loss for ecommerce companies; pay-later mechanisms are now being introduced as an effective solution.
Customers tend to be interested in the product in the first place, but somewhere along the line lose confidence, which leads to abandoning the decision before paying. With the introduction of purchase now and pay later options, customers can then pay after the item has arrived. When this properly starts to take over, this method looks set to reduce business losses at a large extent.
As we can see from the above, innovative methods are continually working towards improved retention and customer acquisition. It’s due to this that online businesses must constantly keep up with the trends, reflecting the advancements and staying competitive. Pay attention to the above predictions, and work on keeping your company ahead of the game for 2020.
