Emerging Trends in E-commerce In the past decade, e-commerce has simplified life by making buying and selling from the comfort of your home or office possible. 2013 saw e-commerce grow big with the US alone handling sales of over $260 billion. However, despite these major strides, e-commerce is still evolving; here are some trends that are going to influence its growth this year: • Enabling mobile payment options: Mobile devices are already becoming the preferred device for browsing e-commerce stores, but they are not the primary device for making purchases; this title still belongs to the PC. 2014 could see this change with ecommerce vendors enabling multiple secure mobile payment options, whether through independent apps and inbuilt features, or through a partnership with payment gateways like PayPal and Google Wallet. • Multi-device or Omni-channel selling: E-commerce vendors need to reach their customer in any which way possible, so maintaining a PC only approach to marketing the site and the products is an unsound strategy. E-commerce firms are realizing this and have earmarked a mobile marketing approach to be developed. • Content becomes even more powerful: With the many updates in search engine approaches and algorithms, many traditional SEO techniques went out of the window. E-commerce vendors have understood that and we believe that 2014 will see a lot of original content being generated in the form of product reviews, tips, instructional videos and much more. • Big Data to power e-commerce: Experts say that 2014 is the ‘Year of Big Data’, whether or not this will hold true for other organizations, it most likely will hold true for e-commerce vendors. Big Data helps e-commerce organizations collect and analyze relevant data to optimize various operational aspects of the organization. • Social Networks and their impact: Social Media has united the world like never before, and this gives e-commerce businesses an inter-connected base of customers and potential customers that can be leveraged to get some great results. A successful social media strategy can change the fate of a business, so e-commerce vendors are going to have to take to the networks this year if they want to grow. • Delivery schedules to get more demanding: Delivery times have been continuously shortened and Amazon’s one-day delivery move has forced e-commerce vendors to offer something similar. Of course it might not be practical or feasible for all e-commerce vendors to have one-day delivery times, but we think that in general delivery times are going to decrease across the sector. • Global products, local experience: It’s great to have a global e-commerce vendor with an established brand offering millions of products, but personalization still has its value. So while the local e-commerce stores are growing, the global giants are going to have to start personalizing services, starting with offering their sites in local languages. Many e-commerce vendors enjoyed great success in 2013, but this year requires them to make changes to stay in the game. For more on the emerging trends in e-commerce, you can read our whitepaper here: link.
We’ve talked more about the benefits of having Big Data Analytics in your B2B E-commerce business in our previous blog: link.