Ecommerce sales have played a progressively important role in retailing. In 2021, ecommerce accounted for approximately 20% of retail sales worldwide. Moreover, forecasts indicate – by 2025, the online segment will be close to a quarter of total global retail sales. Meaning that the ecommerce world will become even more crowded.
While it may seem challenging to compete in this fiercely competitive industry, it is important to know that the ecommerce industry is constantly evolving, and opportunities are growing. And the one who is able to grab an opportunity and survive amidst all this will be the winner.
We have narrowed down the biggest trends that will affect ecommerce businesses and help you win over your competitors.
Ecommerce Businesses Trends to Win Over competitors
1. Learn about buyers with artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence continuously gathers data on how customers shop, what they are looking for in a service/product, and when do they make purchases, offering them automated and personalized shopping experiences. Such technology and set-up cannot be leveraged in-store.
Moreover, considering the fact that more than 80% of leads never convert to sales, it is important to improve the buyer’s journey using artificial intelligence or any such technology. Let’s see how.
- Recommendation engines drive the next best action for B2B
With applied machine learning and the continued maturation of artificial intelligence, businesses can now observe the problems customers are experiencing and recommend appropriate solutions. This is big for the businesses as well as their B2B partners because it has the potential to find the right prospective customers, saving the customer time and mitigating complexity and stress to find the right solutions.
- SEO optimization and automation with AI/ML tools
Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, businesses can automate the process of determining the most effective keywords and tagging ads to reach their B2B customer base, helping write impactful SEO-optimized content.
2. More ways to pay
When it comes to payment methods, customers have individual needs. They might cancel a potential sale if they are unable to make payment using their preferred platform.
Therefore, offering multiple payment gateways is another great way to boost the conversion rate on mobile devices. Plus, if the customers are able to save their bank details or payment information on your website, they will be able to check out even faster when they make a purchase the next time.
3. Sustainability is gaining momentum
Several organizations, social activists, and other environmentalists are making efforts to raise environmental awareness and make the world greener. As a result, consumers are becoming more conscious about what they shop, where they shop, the impact a product and its manufacturing have on the environment
As per a survey conducted to find the value of sustainability in retail, 50% of respondents wanted more sustainability in the fashion industry and 75% wanted to see less packaging.
4. Businesses need to optimize digital strategies for boosting conversions
With marketing strategies like paid ads and SEO, you can increase traffic to your website. But do all or even a significant percentage of visitors will get converted? Most of you would say ‘no’. To cope with this, you need to analyze and optimize your digital strategy.
A few ways to do it are –
- Include social proof
Undoubtedly, your online presence and reputation impact the conversion rate. Almost 89% of consumers check online reviews before making a purchase, making it essential to include social proof on your website. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people consider the action of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given product/service/situation.
You can even add reviews and testimonials to your website so that visitors do not have to go to a third-party website to find the same. It should be evident that your customers enjoyed using your service or product.
- Test your offers
Sometimes, your conversion rate remains low despite all the efforts such as, writing good product descriptions, including social proof, and adding multiple ways to pay. This is when you need to check the content of your offers and analyze if it is creative and compelling, aligns with your audience and makes sense for the page. It is important to make the content tangible and compelling if you want to boost conversions.
- Create abandoned cart email campaigns
It is common for people to visit a website, add something to their cart and then, not check out. This is why the cart abandonment rate has gone up to 90% across industries.
To avoid this issue, you should follow up with such customers by:
- sending out an ‘abandoned cart’ email to remind them about the products in their cart
- sending a follow-up email
- including an offer or discount
If you do not follow-up, you may lose out on various prospective leads and conversions.
Maintain a forward-looking attitude
People and technology are always evolving. And, as ecommerce brings both together, the industry players need to always look forward to the future. Understanding and implementing the latest trends (if they work for your business) will help you stay ahead of the competition and boost your revenue.
Keep an eye on your competitors; search, analyse and implement latest trends; and prioritize the changes that will persuade your customers to make purchases.
The key here is to keep evolving!
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