Current scenario apparently reveals that retail sales through online channels is witnessing a growth of about 25 percent year per year, hence, most of the small and big businesses are focusing on the audience that craves success and technology. Since the number of tech-savvy shoppers are increasing daily, clearly the necessity of delivering them the best experience arises too. There are quite a few trends which will soon take over the online business industry and shape the structure of business on internet to offer users an experience of another level. And, such trends are as follows:
Revolutionizing V- Commerce
V-commerce (voice commerce) will be driving the voice-first revolution. Similar to Google’s pay-per-click advertising model, this has been successful for the past few years. Virtual assistants are playing a crucial role in life, as it is assisting right from creating lists to setting cooking timers, sending hands-free text messages, playing music, answering spontaneous questions to finding nearby restaurants.
V- Commerce will continue to gain worldwide use, as modern consumers call for more streamlined shopping methods. Digital assistants like Alexa, Cortana and Siri are offering convenience and personalization to consumers, resulting in the rise of digital shopping. Thus, every business planning to move ahead, need to start strategizing on how to adapt the changing trends, as time waits for none and so is innovation.
“Voice commerce is up and coming this year,” says Tracey Wallace, Editor at BigCommerce.
Own Proprietary Brand
According to the experts, the e-commerce companies are in the middle of “scoop out”, where retailers who are reselling their products will have to say goodbye within the next five years or so. This will result in making proprietary products more important than ever.
“The biggest trend I’m seeing is that, it’s absolutely crucial that companies have their own proprietary brand, product, or highly specialized offering that can differentiate them if they don’t, they likely won’t last much longer” asserts Andrew Youderian, ecommerce Entrepreneur.
Emerging M-Commerce Models
M-commerce is “coming on strong” emerging industry model. Alike other emerging industry models in market; it is also featured by a large number of technological, demand and strategic concerns.
Nowadays, everyone around us are using their smartphones in each and everything they do, which clearly includes shopping too. This is the reason why online retailers have started thinking firmly on how to improve mobile commerce experiences.
“Mobile commerce is what merchants should care about right now. This is the year we start to see people going beyond the responsive design Band-Aid and actually thinking about mobile user experience”, says Shanelle Mullin, an e-commerce writer.
Increasing use of Digital Wallet
Digital wallets have been proved to be the most convenient gateway to customers when it comes to online shopping as it helps in eliminating the ennui of entering the payment and shipping information manually every time whenever the user wants to buy something online, making the process faster and much convenient. With digital wallet, there is no need of going around for the best combination of payment and loyalty card, moreover avoiding typo errors that can happen while entering any data on small touchscreen devices. Mostly, digital wallets have multiple layers of security to ensure the safety of sensitive information of the customers.
Audience targeting
Further, talking about the success of any business, there apparently rises the need of audience targeting. Audience targeting is generally defined to be the process of concentrating the vast audience to a highly receptive and loyal audience with customized messages and specialized platforms that will replace wide range of marketing options without having any specific target. “We’ll see more soft or no ask/call to action marketing focused on community building, experiences and lifestyle over product specific messaging.”- says Kyle Golding, Chief Strategic Idealist at The Golding Group.
Every now and then, Google is working on the algorithms that are continuously restricting the percentage of audience that sees your advertisements. Hence, every business should start allocating a portion of their marketing budgets into social media marketing to successfully reach their desired audience, which will help them in building a good audience base, plus it will also make it easy to track return on investment in terms of views and clicks.
Word of Mouth: a Successful Strategy
Emerging revolution in internet has taken word of mouth marketing to an ultimate level. Consumers can now share their experiences and opinions about a product or service with their online peers, which have been proved extremely influential and powerful. When it comes to online ratings and reviews that provide incredible benefits, none of the businesses can afford to ignore that, as it can help in increasing consumers’ confidence, enhancing product visibility and also dramatically increasing the sales. Testimonials, reviews, and photos are all types of user-generated content that will not only help you in driving sales upwards but also enhance your search engine optimization efforts.
Considering these trends spotted by the experts, planning should be done based on what your customers want and desire mostly, by having a solid foundation in place you can focus on the bigger picture and move your business ahead.
These changes are going to happen, thus to survive as a business and stay at the forefront of industry, you will have to modify your business in the coming years to accept these popular trends or stay back.
