WordPress Tips

Are we really looking at trends for 2019 when 2018 is not even half over? Yes, especially for eCommerce!

Any retailer, whether online or on the ground, knows that retail is planned out at least a year in advance. If you are not looking at remaining competitive with your WordPress eCommerce website for future years, you could lose ground.

Online Sales Continue to Grow

According to Statista, online sales are expected to grow from $360 billion in 2016 to over $638 billion in 2022. That’s a whopping increase of 77%. With that much growth and revenue at stake, you need to consider the following trends that will shape eCommerce in 2019.

Improved Customer Experience with a Virtual Assistant

Purchasing items from an eCommerce site and from a physical store are two completely diverse experiences. However, with the advent of intelligent virtual assistants, those experiences are likely to be nearly the same very soon.

What customer service do you receive in a physical store – a human assistant guides you to the products that fit your needs and wants according to your preferences. With artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the virtual assistant on an eCommerce site will be able to perform the exact same function with great accuracy. Virtual assistants will make the shopping and purchasing experience much more realistic, and this will lead to happier, more loyal customers.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in eCommerce

Augmented reality is making a huge splash in eCommerce and will be a rising trend in 2018. AR assists your customers by creating an environment in which buying is more realistic. How? Look at these real life examples:

• Sephora, the cosmetics chain, uses augmented reality that lets shoppers try different makeup combination and take photos with the outfit the look is meant to compliment.
• Lenskart, an Indian online platform, lets its customers “try on” different eyeglass frame in 3D. The program creates a virtual face based upon your own face, then lets you try out different glasses.

IKEA and Amazon are leading the way in developing augmented reality for eCommerce. For instance, IKEA Place lets you try out furniture and placement in your own home prior to purchase. Wonder how that sofa would look against that wall? Should you try a different color? Now you can see it online first.

The Dominance of Mobile Apps

An efficient eCommerce website is almost ancillary now with the rise of shopping on mobile apps. Buyers are increasingly adopting mobile devices as their preferred method of browsing and buying. Nearly 60% of all Google searches are from mobile devices, and let’s not forget Google’s dominance in search engines: over 90% of all searches happen over a Google platform – worldwide!

You cannot ignore these statistics and remain competitive.

Mobile friendly websites are good, but the race belongs to mobile apps. Users browse 286% more items across mobile apps versus a mobile friendly site.

The mobile app industry is expected to reach close to 190 billion by 2020, and every leading eCommerce retailer is advocating the use of mobile apps.

Advanced Product Searches

Have you ever gone to a site such as Amazon and typed in a big brand name into the search bar? You get back thousands of results, products, and categories. Or what about a category such as laptops? Your results are in fact based upon popularity overall, not your individual preferences. It saves time for the website, but does it fit your needs? In the future, product searches will be able to tailor search results to meet your individual preferences, which will save you time, make your searches more productive, and improve the shopping experience.

In addition, the option of advanced product searches will allow you to tailor your search. The results will be more refined. This benefits your eCommerce business by shortening the buying cycle time.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Machine learning and AI are making a significant impact on nearly every industry. Machine learning is the application that produces better user experiences based upon historical data and buying preferences. It is a highly efficient move for eCommerce to adopt this technology. Retailers have been collected this data in huge data warehouses for years and base their budgets and purchasing plans upon predictions using this information. The trend in 2019 will be to continue to integrate the mobile/online experience with this predictive feature.

The future is here. Are you prepared? Give NOYO Web Development a call today and let us help you stay competitive in the eCommerce world.