The Future of E-commerce: Key Insights for Success
From the first newsletters to full-scale advertising campaigns, e-commerce marketing has come a long way. With the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning, sales increased by an average of 35%. Since 2021, agencies and companies have been opening exclusively specialized in e-commerce activities.
Within 25 years, this business has generated more than 2 trillion US dollars in sales globally. By 2024, with a CAGR of 8.8% and a global market size of $6.3 trillion, 20.1% of retail purchases will be made online. By 2027, the size of the e-commerce market will be more than $7.9 trillion, and online shopping is expected to account for 23% of the market.
Source: Forbes
With the right combination of trends and expertise, you can increase your e-commerce sales. This article looks at how to turn trends into profits.
Easy navigation and quick product search
Visitors first encounter navigation when entering a website. More than 80% of shoppers leave a website before making a purchase, according to the 2019-2021 Pandemic and the surge in e-commerce. Why? Because of a site map that is complex, unclear, or non-existent.
Linearity statistics say that ad clutter is cited as the primary barrier to a positive user experience by 54% of marketers. Of those who do not file a complaint, 91% go away, while 13% spread word of their negative experience to 15 individuals. On average, 88% of online shoppers are unlikely to return to a retailer after a bad experience, while 89% will buy elsewhere. That’s the must-have point of quick product search and mobile application development firms.
It is like having a $1 investment with the ability to generate a $100 return in terms of the consumer’s perception of a website. To remain constantly in their consumers’ consciousness, about 24,3% of companies invest from $2,000 up to $2,500 in the website design and receive up to $15,000 in return.
Personalized product recommendations
Personalized recommendations are centered around data, and tailored suggestions are made to online customers based on their browsing history, previous purchases, and interests. For example, if a customer routinely buys running shoes, the e-commerce platform can promote comparable athletic gear, resulting in a more customized shopping experience.
For the past five years, personifying product recommendations via mobile applications has been a classic e-commerce practice. There have been several types of recommendations:
- Seamless in-app recommendations. This tool displays products that match a user’s previous preferences directly on the home or category screen.
- Targeted push notifications. These notifications suggest products or offers that are in line with the user’s interests and past activity.
- Engaging interactivity. Attract more prospects and build trust with new customers by visualizing statistics, such as product quality surveys.
The combination of these types increases the variability of sales and reduces the spamming of the user’s feed. Overcode, which develops mobile applications and platforms for SignifAI and Hydrolix, uses personalized recommendations to reach a wider audience and promote its products.
Convenient and secure payment methods
While Internet payments are quick and easy, they also raise outstanding concerns for businesses and their customers. Unauthorized parties can gain access to sensitive information such as credit card numbers and account passwords if the checkout process is not secure. According to Statista, cybersecurity spending is expected to reach over $80 billion in 2023, and the market is projected to exceed $87 billion by 2024.
Popular payment methods such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square are known for their reliability, security, and ease of integration. All these types are common for the 2024 e-commerce retailer, both from the standpoint of the customer and from the business processes enhancement point of view.
Push notifications and personalized promotions
One of the key features of e-commerce marketing today is push notifications. Reminders of some event or another (product promotions, drawing or availability of bonuses, subscription expiration, and so on) serve to communicate between the company and the customer.
Push notifications can easily expand your business opportunities, regardless of your company size or customer base. With your push notifications, your subscribers can be directed to:
- a shopping cart with outstanding products;
- a content update (blog post, podcast, or video);
- information about a new product release or update;
- surveys and questionnaires.
Promotions are the evolved push notifications. Earlier, such marketing tools had a specific scope, but now, it is not restricted to each particular platform.
As Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a new reality, organizations are in search of how to make everything concerning the customer as individual as possible, including offering specific prices, launching unique promotions, or even having web designs that interact with the customer in accordance with their desires.
Easy returns and order tracking
In the business world, order management is like playing with flaming chainsaws in the middle of a storm. Keeping track of a company’s inventory, meeting demand, and ensuring customer satisfaction can seem overwhelming. However, one tool can help during all this confusion — order management. It used to be that order tracking was just a customer benefit. Today’s businesses need tools that increase performance, clarity, and client satisfaction.
In e-commerce, from when an order is placed to when it is delivered, order tracking is essential for providing customers with visibility into the status of their purchases. Customers can track their orders online to know when their package will arrive and where it is in the shipping process using tracking numbers or order IDs. To manage inventory, process orders efficiently, and coordinate delivery logistics, e-commerce platforms and logistics companies use order tracking systems.
Final Thoughts: Back To The E-Commerce Future
What will tomorrow’s business bring? From an e-commerce point of view, it’s all about enhancing the user experience to discover a company’s products. The creation of mobile versions of products is going to increase daily, and by January 2024, more than 50 mobile applications will be created every day. The statistics of the Mindsea portal show that 59.70% of the global website traffic comes from mobile phones and just 38.20% from desktops.
Push notifications will be integrated with personalized offers, possibly complemented by e-mail newsletters to provide a better experience for the consumer.
Tracking systems, possibly with more flexible UX/UI configurations, will strive for better cybersecurity and transactional anonymity.
