eCommerce Trends Every Business should Know

E-commerce isn’t a stagnant landscape that you can leave to grow as is. With the recent surge of online competition ever since the start of the pandemic, the worst thing you could do as an e-commerce platform is to stop innovating!

Keeping up and exceeding the will of your competition is tough. However, it helps you keep up with today’s trends and make sure that you don’t get left behind in obscurity.

Looking out for e-commerce trends isn’t as simple as searching for what’s the hottest thing today—it’s about analyzing each trend on the internet and adopting them as you see fit. As 2020 comes and goes, here are some e-commerce trends that you should adopt now or keep listed for the future!

Social Media—Social Commerce

With an estimate of over 3.6 billion people using social media online, it’s safe to say that these platforms have loads of potential. Businesses are already starting to take advantage of social media’s power by making pages dedicated to engaging with their many followers and posting content! Since people browse social media for hours upon hours each day, this has proven incredibly potent.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are the four giants of the social media industry, and sticking to even one of these can get you a lot of publicity. However, many businesses are wasting the potential that social media has when it comes to e-commerce by limiting their pages to simply marketing their brand!

Though the options are limited, some social media platforms allow customers to make purchases in the app instead of being redirected. Features and apps such as Instagram Shopping and Checkout on Instagram allow the processes included in online shopping to happen in the Instagram app itself!

Statistics show that upwards of 30% of internet users between 18 and 40 have purchased social media. Making your page’s digital media easy for your customers to make a purchase can boost your sales by a considerable margin! Running your main website alongside your social media e-commerce page will be the most efficient way to gain customers quickly and will become a lot more commonplace in the future.

Conversational Commerce

Digital messaging is an unexpected medium of e-commerce that many companies are starting to use to connect with their customers on a personal level. Most of the time, conversational commerce is in the form of interactive chat bots capable of answering basic common questions and purchasing decisions. This unexpected trend is being backed by a lot of users too!

Hubspot statistics show that 35% of customers want more companies to utilize chatbot options. It makes the entire process of ordering products more intimate and swift, depending on how seamless you can make your chatbot.

Investing some money to create a chatbot that can engage and improve your customer support will be money well-spent!

Celebrity Endorsements & Sponsorships

Influencer marketing is becoming more and more popular as time goes on. Giving sponsorships to celebrities and influencers in exchange for publicity is an easy way of garnering a lot of attention from many people. Getting even a single social media post or sponsored YouTube message out from a person with millions of followers guarantees that you get the word out on your company!

Endorsing discounts and selling affordable packages will incentivize people to check out your products and services. And when that happens, you’ll see an influx of new potential loyal customers!

Soon enough, endorsements and sponsorships will be a necessity for brands that want to make it big. Make sure you don’t get left behind and find unique ways to utilize celebrity endorsements to its fullest extent.

Video Content

Videos are one of the most popular sources of both entertainment and information on the internet. Not only are they incredibly flexible, but they can be about literally anything! E-commerce businesses are beginning to use videos to display their products in action and in real life to satisfy their customers’ curiosity!

Getting engagement and keeping your customers intrigued and entertained are only some of the benefits that utilizing video content can give you. Videos can even be used on your social media platforms in the form of product showcases and behind-the-scenes footage to make your customers feel involved in the process.

Personalization—Personalized Marketing

Go to any big-name e-commerce website like Amazon or video hosting websites such as Netflix and YouTube and start browsing for items and content. You’ll begin to notice that the recommendations start to change to adjust to the type of content you watch.

Personalization or personalized marketing is all about making recommendations unique from person to person based on their purchasing habits and interests. There are a plethora of ways in which you can make your customer’s experience feel personal. Even something as simple as sending them discounts when they haven’t been to the site that often or sending a birthday offer to them can make your e-commerce company stand out from the rest!

Interactive Content

A trend that has been going on for years now and probably will never fade is quality content. Though it’s more of a necessity than a trend, it is crucial to consistently give high-quality content to your customers to attract new ones and keep loyal ones!

Interactive content is a newer form of content strategy that lets customers take an optional route of answering questions to get the product best suited to their tastes. An example of this is Bright cellars, a wine company that gives you a series of questions on preferences and taste profiles that give you three wine bottles that suit your tastes.

Going one step further and trying to give your customer a product that they might enjoy is a surefire way of solidifying your relationship. It doesn’t matter what type of products you sell—there’s bound to be a way that you can create an interactive quiz based all around it!

Remember, trends in the digital world changes every day, so get the latest updates in your industry from a reliable source. Update and change your approach accordingly and work with the best team.