This 2021, without a doubt, is standing out for being the year in which companies have to innovate and reinvent themselves. Many companies have gone digital as a way to stay alive. Therefore, it is very important to investigate trends in the eCommerce sector to adapt business plans. In this search, the question that many players try to answer is what real innovations in eCommerce are working and are trending. Jorge Zuñiga Blanco, an entrepreneur and eCommerce expert from Costa Rica, provides those answers.
Voice searches are one of the eCommerce trends that is working the most in 2021. Asserts Zuñiga, “According to Comscore eCommerce data, by the end of this year, more than 50% of digital search queries will be by voice. This type of search with conversion possibilities is not only linked to the assistants of our smartphones or tablets, but also to the new Google Home, Amazon Echo or Apple HomePod.
If, at the moment, you have not decided to integrate your products into a marketplace, what you can do is optimize your store for voice searches and benefit from this eCommerce trend. To do this, your descriptive content must be able to answer questions, not just keywords. The interrogative pronouns that are used in spoken and colloquial language, (where?, which one?, what?), together with a bet on featured snippets, will help you improve the results of the pages in the SERPs that are displayed in voice searches.
A Gartner report stated last year that seven out of ten ai projects in eCommerce are a success. It is not surprising, therefore, that artificial intelligence and machine learning are two of the fastest-growing eCommerce trends in 2021. The personalized shopping experience goes far beyond the “recommendations” or “wish list” tabs that are already found in many current eCommerce. It’s not just pre-data and buying behavior that make machine learning easier—also, predictive learning, with an increasing success rate in planned purchases.
But personalization can have much more travel within eCommerce trends, especially turned towards the concept of exclusivity. “Thanks to Big Data and its intelligence applications,” explains Zuñiga, “automated emails with offers can be sent to the mail of users who have left the carts abandoned offering, for example, exclusive fast shipments if it is detected that the customer has stopped at that point in the conversion funnel.”
Although email marketing does not require a large investment, it is one of the means that generates more revenue in online stores, even more than social media combined. Coupled with an automated Inbound Marketing strategy, the success of our actions is practically assured.
Chatbots will be a primary source of information and data from our consumers in 2021. They currently operate in more than 85% of customer service centers. With the refinement of chatbots, users can chat in a virtual environment with an algorithm instead of a real person. Automating the services of queries or searches of products is not only one of the most important eCommerce trends that saves time and money, but also allows you to obtain data in a friendly way that is very useful.
Chatbots are being developed and perfected exponentially along with the automation of other marketing systems. They can be integrated as messaging bots on Facebook and attract new customers who come to formalize a purchase. Hubspot has already announced this. According to their eCommerce data, 47% of online shoppers would buy products from a chatbot and 37% would prefer buying via Facebook to the online store.
Surely you’ve heard of blockchain, one of the most popular technological innovations of recent years that allows you to encrypt data securely without the need for a central control point. It was through blockchain that the well-known cryptocurrency was developed: Bitcoin. Due to the interest of many companies in blockchain research, this is one of the great eCommerce trends of 2021. Some of its advantages are payment security, fast and efficient data processing and increased speed of online transactions. And this is one of the most interesting points.
Since eCommerce will benefit in the future from greater customer confidence in this cryptocurrency, stores that authorize them as a form of payment will consequently be faster, work better and offer their customers a better shopping experience.
Users are increasingly using mobile devices to search and end up shopping. In fact, in 2018, 38% of all business transactions were made via a mobile phone and in 2019, nearly 60% of Google searches were from a mobile device or tablet. 5G is being much talked about this 2021. There are reports that 5G technology will help generate $12 billion in new eCommerce revenue by 2021. That’s why more and more merchants have focused on optimizing their online stores and payment methods for mobile devices, in order to achieve a fast and smooth experience.
Once again, Marketing Automation brings advantages and benefits to our company. In this case, if you put together Marketing Automation and eCommerce, you can attract customers in a faster and easier way, at the same time as security. Some Marketing Automation platforms, such as Mautic, allow you to create workflows, that is, automation of the company’s tasks, following an order and a hierarchy. This will allow you to focus on lead generation strategies.
According to data from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), 65% of multinationals will increase influencer marketing spending over the coming months. This is because nearly 49% of consumers look for influencers before buying a product, according to The State of Influencer Marketing 2019: Benchmark Report study. This type of marketing continues to grow and in 2021, it will be one of the most used trends by companies. The company’s marketing departments realized that products sponsored by influencers had added value. It’s a way for your products to look and know each other more and therefore increase their sales.
According to everything analyzed, trends and innovations in eCommerce grow exponentially, so it is very important to be attentive and join them in order to obtain incredible results and benefits. The most interesting thing is that this investment will be returnable in the short and medium-term. As stated by the consulting firm Gartner, 60% of eCommerce will use artificial intelligence solutions in 2021 and a third of revenues will come from this technology. Therefore, any innovation that you decide to implement in your eCommerce, you have to do it always thinking about optimizing the user’s shopping experience and achieving the loyalty of this.
