5 new trends sweeping the ecommerce industry

By Ella Noll

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing industries today. Modern consumers want the quickest, cheapest options for their purchases, and ecommerce is providing exactly that. Let’s look at five trends revolutionizing the industry right now.

1. Chatbots. According to research conducted in 2017 by Ubisend, 35 percent of consumers explicitly want more chatbots. Chatbots offer automated responses to user questions allowing them to get their answers faster.

More consumers prefer to interact with brands via chatbot than phone or email. And companies are responding accordingly. A survey conducted by Oracle found that 80 percent of responding retailers had deployed chatbots or would do so by 2020.

2. Growing international markets. A study from Nielsenfound that 57 percent of shoppers globally had made an overseas purchase in the last six months.

Euromonitor International even expects ecommerce to be the fastest growing global retail channel through 2022, anticipating 73 percent growth. Consumers are no longer constrained by borders and their purchases reflect exactly that.

3. Sellers moving beyond Amazon. Amazon composes 49.1 percent of all U.S. online retail spending. But marketplace sellers account for 50 percent of the units sold on Amazon.

This shows the ecommerce market as a whole is growing faster than Amazon’s market share. In fact, 70 percent of sellers earn the majority of their revenue from storefronts, not from Amazon.

4. Evolution of ecommerce search engines. Consumers are more likely to purchase an item online when they can find exactly what they want. And ecommerce search engine algorithms are making that easier.

Online shoppers expect the ability to sort results with weighted reviews and based on relevant categories. Ecommerce sites need proper search engines if they want to attract customers.

5. Voice Commerce. Twenty percent of U.S. adults now own a smart speaker like Amazon Echo or Google Home. And of those people, more than one third have ordered groceries from the machine.

Though it’s still far behind revenue brought in by ecommerce, voice commerce is on the rise. Gartner anticipates that 20 percent of web browsing will be done without a screen by 2020.

Read more about technology trends in ecommerce at the link below.

Five ways ecommerce is being revolutionized right now – Manish Dudharejia, Econsultancy.com

Ella Noll is a Client Manager at InTouch Manufacturing Services, a QC firm that performs product inspections and factory audits in Asia for clients in the US, EU and Australia.