Top eCommerce trends to watch in 2020

Adapting your business and your product to today’s trend is the first step to cope up in this highly competitive market. And you will win in this game as an entrepreneur if you are all set and ready to face tomorrow’s trends. To be a thought leader in your niche, you should consistently watch out the growth of your industry and well equip yourself for the change. Ecommerce is a huge innovative environment where anyone can influence the global market.

Statista predicts 2.14 billion people to shop online by 2021 which is 28% of today’s world population.

So grab all the online shoppers to your site with the high-end eCommerce trends. Here is the list of top10 eCommerce trends that every entrepreneur should watch out in 2020.

1. Predictive analytics to analyze customer behavior 

Future proof your eCommerce for the millennial with predictive analytics that helps you to analyze the customer behavior with the help of the technologies that combine artificial intelligence,  big data analytics, and automation. Harish Bijoor, a retail expert and brand strategist says that the future of retail effectiveness and efficiency falls under the hands of predictive retail. In a market survey taken by industryresearch.com, the predictive & prescriptive analytics market valued USD 6.64 billion in 2018 and is estimated to reach USD 22.50 billion by 2024. And the most remarkable thing is that retail is expected to hold a major market share of it. 

2. Social selling 

This new eCommerce model in town is gaining more traction towards it. Many popular social commerce channels have already reached the metro cities of India. The social commerce report of business insider intelligence estimated that US social commerce sales would take over the market for the upcoming five years by 7.8% growth in 2024. It is sure that social commerce would become the new frontier in online shopping in 2020 and beyond. Being untouched by eCommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart, you can expect that to happen in the following years as forecasted by the business insider report. Besides US, India is the perfect market place for social commerce. Here is why.

3. Artificial intelligence

Being an early bird in adopting visual AI in the e-commerce industry can give you a 30 percent increase in revenue by 2021. For eCommerce sites, you can tag your images automatically using visual AI instead of spending resources and time on doing it. The visual AI also makes searching easier than the traditional keyword searching method. Outsmart your industry with artificial intelligence to stand out from your competitors. Give your business a competitive edge with machine learning to understand your customer behavior. Before 2020 begins, understand that the search engine understanding has evolved and you need to focus on semantic SEO than just focusing on a bunch of keywords and backlinks. 

4. Personalization

Millennials want more than personalization. Insta page states that one can convert 80% of your customers with a hyper-personalized content. Research from Forrester Consulting finds that personalized human feel of brand can convert 1.6 times better than the others and also, the customers are 1.8 times more likely to recommend it to others.

5. Conversion optimization with user-generated content

The users are the great source of information that gives you the details where you should improve and what is actually required.  Chen Xiao Ping, CEO of Intime Retail Group (a unit of Alibaba group) is using the significance of user-generated data to converge online and offline retail. He says that each payment is the beginning of new payment for their company. You can expect eCommerce giants like Alibaba and Amazon consider their huge data bank as a new fuel to throttle up their business.

6. Dropshipping

Make this trending eCommerce practice work the best for you. This is a form of eCommerce where the merchant doesn’t involve in stock management but mediates the transaction for a commission. There are many pros in this business model such as you don’t need to stock up your inventory or handle the storage of the product. As a start-up, you can easily invest in dropshipping and scale up your business later. The major fallback of the model is the customer support. This is the major drawback of dropshipping that was stopping it in 2019. Cross that barrier in 2020 with the ultimate guide to dropshipping given by Shopify. 

7. Omnichannel presence

The eCommerce strategy is worth the hype for the upcoming competitive year 2020. A report from cliczk.com states that omnichannel marketing automation includes 250% higher purchase frequency and 90% higher customer retention rates in its statistics of 2019. And also Millenials nowadays check two or three channels before they make their purchase decision. So, it is important to present in two or more channels to cover the bigger audience as well. 

The above report stated by KMPG shows that the consumer’s decision is 65%  influenced by other retailers or eCommerce sites and other factors such as online advertisements, reviews in other channels, blogs, articles, and social media presence. These are the places where customers see products before the purchase and you should never be absent.

8. Augmented reality and virtual reality

The e-commerce sites would provide you with in-house experience with the help of virtual and augmented reality. You can try out the dresses online without heading to the outlet. Especially for the flourishing furniture in the e-commerce market, it lets you test if the particular furniture suits and fits your living area. Global Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Market was valued US$ 6.1 Bn in 2017 and is expected to reach US$ 58.2 Bn by 2026, at a CAGR of 32.57% during the forecast period.

9.  ROPO

ROPO is actually the acronym of research online and purchase offline. This means that most of the customers rely on the research that is done online and also checks the product in-store to make sure that the product is really convincing. The statistics from gathering the reports of major eCommerce sites and research trends, it is said that eCommerce influences 56% of the in-store purchases and 18% of local searches become sales lead within 24 hours. 

10. Video product descriptions 

There is no doubt that you can convert your lead better with a video demo than showing a simple image. Some of the eCommerce sites already started to test the video product descriptions for their product. Not just for electronic gadgets, you can witness the video of a model wearing the dress that is sold along with the product image. Unboxing videos are ultimate conversion hackers which has more than 10.3 billion views up to date as mentioned in wall street journal article. 

In this competitive world of eCommerce, you need to brace your business with strong technicalities to stand out from the crowd and to thrive in the competition. Get in touch with the best web development company that can combine all the intelligence to build your eCommerce site. If you already have a web development team, hire the right talented developers for developing your business.