Every year many companies either developing eCommerce projects or operating play an interesting game: the hottest trends prediction. And this year UKAD gladly takes part too and presents its list of the hottest trends in eCommerce-2020! We hope, this list will be useful for everyone reading it.
As soon as eCommerce and related areas are the most rapid growing industries, it’s crucial to meet trends, but setting trends is even better. We outlined the most interesting tendencies both from technical and financial sides and also some wow-trends, which look funny but fascinating. Some of emerging trends in eCommerce are easy to implement and requires just a voluntary decision, as soon as other needs quite a huge investment. So, it’s easy to plan the implementation for the whole year long and start to benefit immediately.
Why trends are important?
The foremost question of this article is rather not an overview of emerging trends in eCommerce but assistance in awareness of the necessity to be trendy. For example, Absolunet predicted the rise of so-called ethical consumption and the growth of PWA popularity in 2019. And what do we have today? BeyondMeat burgers, eco-leather clothes, fancy tote bags and sneakers from recycled plastic bottles are the bestsellers of all times, as well as progressive web applications that are successfully utilized by commercial monsters like AliExpress.
On the other side, we don’t let you take a loan to buy drones blindly. Not every trend is suitable for every business, but the easiest should be implemented as soon as possible or your business would get in danger.
Tech trends
Here come upcoming trends in eCommerce which will change the technical part of the web stores and present a new approach to their development and management. In fact, they don’t require any deep changes in the existing websites, except very old ones. But they couldn’t be implemented in one click, so you can ask us for help and our development team will gladly do that!
Create videos!
Probably, the hottest of new eCommerce trends! Today, we got a fast Internet connection and widespread mobile devices. Which means the growing number of people who don’t want to read texts and look at the pictures, but watch video reviews.
I do believe that everything sales better with a short video. At first, it’s more interesting to watch and listen to reviews than reading. The key point lies somewhere deep in human psychology, but the facts say: if people have a choice, they choose video representation. Next, video review suits better to highlight killer features and hide cons, especially when it is goodly recorded with a pleasant reviewer staring.
Video reviews may suit the best for sellers of gadgets and houseware, clothes, make-up and other things in which appearance makes sense. Otherwise, it may be used to sell software, games, musical records, and movies. In this case, a video review should be a kind of demo or teaser with professional comments.
Real-time conversations, chatbots, and AI
You should ask what’s similar between all these things. A new approach to communication with buyers, isn’t it obvious? Your target audience always wants to receive as much information as possible but hates calls, if you sell goods cheaper than an aircraft. It seems to run in the way where chatbots in popular messengers will be the most important channel of communication with an audience for the following reasons:
- It’s fast and comfy, customers shouldn’t plan calls, spend their time waiting and so on because they can receive all the information they need in a few clicks using Telegram or Facebook Messenger via smartphones.
- A chatbot can not only tell about payment method, delivery, etc. but also work as a checkout, which reduces the time required to make a decision.
- A chatbot can collect feedback in the most comfortable way.
- It’s less expensive to implement chatbots than hire call-center operators.
So, it’s expectable that chatbots users’ number is dramatically increasing!
Voice Search Optimization
I bet it’s something new for you. But it’s already here! Voice Search Optimization is a kind of Search Engine Optimization but inclined to the voice search requests. As Alexa and Siri become more and more popular, it’s becoming necessary to optimize your content because the number of search queries made by voice is increasing and estimated to reach 50% in 2020.
The best opportunity provided by Google Home and Amazon Echo is the growth of so-called long-tailed keywords weight along with the rising number of question-like queries. It means, people ask ‘Where are the best lunches in New York’ instead of typed ‘new york lunch’ because it’s more human. So, you can easily optimize your content to receive more orders just putting relevant phrases on your pages.
Finance trends
The next part is about those things you have to do with your financial part. Sometimes, all these new eCommerce trends seem risky or even crazy but take a closer look: they’re genius!
Dynamic pricing
Here we need some explanations. Flexible pricing is not a cutting edge invention, even more, it’s far older than fixed price policy. Medieval people exchanged their goods in the city markets without fixed prices and didn’t care. But today an idea to let The Invisible Hand establish prices looks almost revolutionary.
In fact, a flexible pricing approach remains popular but only in a close range of industries. For example, airlines can update prices several times a day according to demand. And eCommerce providers start to run such a policy in different ways. At first, it’s simple so-called run to the bottom in which prices are manually changed to the lowest possible. We won’t criticize such an approach now but here is a better option: data-driven flexible pricing. Let AI analyze the market and come with the best prices! It’s obvious, I adhere to the second way because it’s smarter, which means safer and more effective than just let the content manager google your goods and replace prices each Monday.
Web Payments
Today all eCommerce providers should pay more attention to retention, and web payments come as one of the best tools to do that. So, how does it work? Users save their payment methods and use them without authorizations, long inputs, etc. Just similar to saved credentials in a browser! At the time, I’m not sure if this technology is developed enough to be implemented, but during 2020 it should become useful and very popular. Let’s monitor!
Subscription-based models
Okay, now you are ready for the most revolutionary trend of modern eCommerce — anything as a service! Each new lead costs too much so here emerges an obvious idea to bound existing customers with providers using a kind of subscription. Today you can already subscribe to meals, household chemicals, even socks delivery, but what about the smartphone as a service? Apple and Xiaomi are already establishing such a model. Analyze your industry and think about what can you provide on a subscription model. Would it be a replenishment service for goods with short usage terms or an access service in which it would be a sort of rent? Maybe, you will offer a curation service to provide your customers goods with collectional value as they are released, eg. toys or music vinyl?
Easier checkout
Various researchers say that up to 75% of shopping carts are abandoned at the checkout. What does it mean? In most cases, it was too difficult to finish shopping on a certain website due to many reasons, and a provider lost money. For you, it means a necessity to audit and redesign your checkout. Maybe, you ask for too much information, put on hidden payments or even require registration to make a purchase.
WOW Trends
And the last ones! The hottest eCommerce trends of the last years are impressive. Let the audience say ‘Wow!’ facing your business model and stay impressed.
Delivery robots
Amazon introduced its drone delivery in 2016. And it was a great invention! In the next few years, several more market leaders invented robotized delivery which is not advertising but a real option. Just look at that video!
It seems you aren’t from Amazon or FedEx, so your business doesn’t have enough money to buy several hundred delivery drones. But you can do a little research to know if there are any local companies providing robotized delivery and include their services in your checkout.
AR Commerce
Augmented or Virtual Reality shopping is here! I’m not sure if we can walk through the megamall using VR, but we already can ‘try’ some goods with augmented reality technologies. For example, Lacoste’s LCST Lacoste AR app can help you to pick up another pair of sneakers. And IKEA Place will show you several furniture options that suit your house perfectly. Your Grandma says it’s magic, but it’s better than magic. It’s one of the hottest eCommerce trends!
User-generated goods
Here are some people who think that Fast Fashion is too slow, and they are looking for even more customizable options than a new collection each week. They want to create goods themselves! For some fashion stores, it’s already a common practice, but would it be adopted in other industries?
Summarizing
So, what are the main upcoming trends in eCommerce? To be creative, to be friendly with your customers, and to be unique — the whole article is about these statements. Everything else is up to you! And UKAD is ready to help you become the next-year’s eCommerce trendsetter. Stay tuned.
Originally published at https://www.ukad-group.com.
