The online retail sector has been constantly evolving since its inception. The ecommerce industry has proven to be a valuable platform for retail, because of its ease of use, global reach, and availability of products, that were otherwise limited in the traditional brick and mortar stores.
As per a recent market forecast, the ecommerce sales in USA alone could surpass $550 billion by the end of the year. While these numbers are instilling confidence in many entrepreneurs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every ecommerce company is bathing in gold. Many online retail startups have crashed and burned before seeing the light of the day.
There are four trends playing a crucial role in shaping the ecommerce industry this year:
Mobile Will Dominate
With the advent of the ‘smartphone generation’, it comes as a little surprise, that the future online shopping will rest in the palm of the users. Lets face it; when you have the computing power of a conventional PC in your hands, fueled by fast and effective internet (4G and WIFI), why would you then spend more time at a stationary desktop?
Even popular ecommerce brands like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay have nifty mobile applications that can be availed for free on any smartphone and streamlined the shopping experience to be simple and easy.
Contextual Shopping Spree
Ecommerce websites save your details and information for ease of use when you register and shop at the site. It’s a reality of the process. Companies are now shifting to an even more personalized experience with intuitive shopping aids that is based on your search queries without having to sign-in, referred to as a contextual shopping experience.
This new shopping aid strategy is too early to quantify the effectiveness. But, shoppers might like the idea of receiving deals without having to sign in all the time.
More CX than UX
Although user experience (UX) is still an integral concept when it comes to website responsiveness and design structure, ecommerce stores are likely to diverge from this focus area. This year ecommerce sites are being designed and redesigned to make them more customer-centric. User and customer may not appear all that different when it comes to their behavior on a website.
However, customer experience (CX) includes a lot more quantum aspects of a shopper’s journey as compared to UX. After all, an online retail store is still, a store for the prospective shopper looking to make a purchase and the focus on the customer’s need, journey, assistance, context of search and the final product is of key importance.
Real-Time Analytics
To win a game of ecommerce sales, everything needs to function in real-time. This is where real-time analytics is going to play a crucial role. The advantage of real time analytics, is to not only provide live data of the site; but also focus on minor details such as form submission error, unresponsive buttons, unusual load time, and many other nitty gritty problems that might affect user loss.
Based on the data, the website development team can start working on resolving the issue a lot sooner than otherwise. For any ecommerce site, the key is to plan right, plan ahead, and consider making your site mobile responsive to attract more customers.
