Technology has always shaped the way the retail sector operates and, in the digital age this has led to the ever-increasing take-up of eCommerce platforms to do business over. Not every online store might boast the same turnover as Amazon or eBay but most brick-and-mortar stores now have an online shop if only to showcase their product ranges. What does the future hold for eCommerce and which are the most important trends to be aware of?
1. Voice-Based Searches
A huge number of households throughout the Western world now use a smart speaker for more than simply turning on their favorite playlists. Voice-based searches are now more and more important to many businesses that rely on getting the attention of would-be consumers. Voice-based technology is only likely to grow from here on, so optimizing websites with content that will pick up on the right sorts of voice-based inquiries, as opposed to traditionally typed-in keywords, is something that is very much shaping the eCommerce sector today.
2. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is crucial for the success of eCommerce businesses today but how does technology help? One way is through so-called omnichannel marketing which is about creating a consistent approach so that consumers obtain a unified buying experience. Technology helps simplify how this is achieved so that online stores run by people with little know-how in digital marketing can obtain professional results. Making use of an omnichannel eCommerce platform, for example, will enable users to string their marketing efforts on different channels together, within a single interface, importing products from different types of CMS. This way, ads can be displayed on a wide variety of platforms in one go. This enables companies to create more well-targeted ads with less effort.
3. Artificial Intelligence
AI is now widely used in eCommerce, typically making recommendations based on what customers are likely to be most interested in from the available data. Of course, for this reason, AI and data harvesting go hand-in-hand in the eCommerce world because the results are so much stronger when the two are well aligned. AI isn’t just an automated recommender tool, however. It is increasingly being deployed to deal with straightforward customer service questions and even sales inquiries. If someone is looking for a product to solve a particular problem, then an AI chatbot can often be the best way to understand the need and make an appropriate suggestion. There again, since many post-sales questions are similar in nature, using AI to respond to the most typical ones is often preferred to simply referring customers to the FAQs section. This means, like other eCommerce technology trends, it can be a big cost-saver.
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