E-commerce In 2021 | What To Expect & New Trends

 

E-commerce In 2021 | What To Expect & New Trends

The importance of e-commerce in 2021 is much higher than in past years. It’s important to aware of the trends to lookout for in 2021 and things you need to know and be on top of if you want to succeed with e-commerce in the next year. So there's been a lot of changes and a lot of movement going on due to the coronavirus the pandemic whatever you want to call it and there's a lot of things that are changing, and things that are becoming a lot more important and things that are becoming less important when it comes to e-commerce and the way you run an e-commerce store whether it's Shopify or amazon or you're selling a Walmart.

 Whatever type of e-commerce store you have and there's been a lot of movement due to the pandemic people being quarantined to more sales online there are more e-commerce sales and they're growing at a very rapid rate and not only is that just for during the pandemic even after those trends are going to continue.

NEW TRENDS

 

By 2021 e-commerce sales are estimated to be 5.5 trillion dollars. So let's talk about a couple of these trends and how you can stay on top of these and how you can benefit from these so one of the first trends is;

 Having a mobile-friendly website or mobile purchasing.

 

Mobile is becoming a lot more prevalent with faster phones more accessibility and ability on them this year. Over 50 percent of online sales were made through a mobile device. In 2021 it's estimated that 73 of online purchases will be made through a mobile device so something like a phone. So it's critically important that if you have a Shopify website or whatever it is that you are mobile-friendly that is optimized for mobile. That's more important than optimizing for a desktop or something else you need to be optimized. For mobile, it needs to be easy to use it needs to work because over 30 percent of shoppers abandon their cart if they find out a website is not mobile-friendly and 73 is a huge chunk of online sales. Imagine if you just took that away you're missing the majority of your audience if you are not mobile-friendly. So having something mobile-friendly that can load fast if there are slower internet speeds is critically important. It's critically important now because that's about half the traffic but it will be even more so in 2021.

The next thing is E-mails SMS

 

Recently Facebook messenger has become bigger and bigger taking over email but one of the biggest trends I see happening now and will just continue to increase is having text message or SMS take over any communication that eCommerce stores have with their customers and to put it in perspective the average open rate for emails is 10 to 15 the average open rate for Facebook. Messenger is about 80 and the average open rate for text messages or SMS is about 98 think about it you get a text on your phone. Do you normally click it?  Do you open it?

Yes now if you get a Facebook message do you maybe delete it most of the time. You're going to look at it if you get an email you probably delete more e-mails than you look at and e-mail is just going down and down and down Facebook Messenger is doing. Well but there are a lot more restrictions on Facebook messenger because of so many more businesses and people utilizing that for marketing messages or communication with their customer's customer support. The same thing will eventually probably happen with SMS once it grows and gets bigger but having SMS as a means of communication have a means of marketing compared to email. So let's say you get a 10 to 15 open rate on email but you're getting 98 on the text you're reaching nine times more people just because you're using SMS instead of email. It is a huge huge difference and that's also going with the mobile-friendly side of things if you're optimized for mobile. You have text it will be an easy kind of streamlined process for that customer so SMS is a big one for 2021.

The growth of artificial intelligence or AI and AR

 

It's estimated that online sellers will spend 7.3 billion dollars investing in the research and using artificial intelligence in AR. The whole goal of AI and AR is to make the buying experience as easy as possible. If you guys have any done any research on marketing or sales or website pages and whatnot the best way is to have the customer take the least amount of actions every action you add before they have to purchase usually greatly decreases the number of people that will convert.

 So if you want to buy a product perfect example is amazon if you have the one-click buy now button you click buy now and then you click confirm and you bought a product in two clicks. Instead of having to add to cart click continue uh customize it fill out your information and then click purchase. There's a big difference between those two things and by 2022 there will be over 120000 stores using AI and AR technology. And part of the reason is it's making the online buying experience a lot easier for certain things like you can't try out a product online.

You can't test something out you can't see it so having AR and being able to see that kind of stuff will help a lot and one of the big ways AI is going to be used is to personalize the shopping experience so it can take data and personalize a certain web page or a checkout page or show you certain products. And make it the best experience for that individual customer and there are tons of different ways these are going to be used.  I'm excited to see kind of the new technologies and ways bigger stores adapt this so AI and AR are some of the big things to look out for in 2021.

 Voice shopping

 

 A lot of you probably know what voice shopping is or some of you have probably even purchased using your voice using something like an amazon echo or a dot or whatever but it is just beginning the growth of voice shopping because it's exploded in the U.S. It's starting to explore elsewhere and grow a ton the number of voice choppers is expected to grow 55 by 2022. The majority of this growth has come from amazon and amazon's echo or talking to Alexa and say hey Alexa buy this product.  Voice shopping can be kind of tricky for a purchaser and a seller because they don't see the Product it searches for the best product for whatever it is. If it's on let's say amazon and it will go and it will purchase that product now what product it chooses?  Now that depends and optimizing for that when you are a seller can be extremely critical and beneficial. Especially with the increase of voice shopping and there will be a lot of movement and more competition for ranking for when someone says hey Alexa buy this product in ranking for that keyword and knowing okay what determines if amazon puts this product for if you say hey amazon go buy me milk. What will it pick? We'll pick this listing or this listing and that will become a very big thing with google shopping with amazon and ranking for those is going to become more and more important and drive more sales. By 2025 75 of us households will have a smart speaker where they can purchase using voice.

 It's estimated that 50 billion in sales will come yearly from voice shopping right now the convenience.  The accuracy of this is not the best but they are growing and getting better.  It's just going to grow into 21 and become more important the next trend is eco-friendly. Now, this has been one for a good amount of time but it's becoming more and more important and more people are becoming kind of more conscious and eco-friendly. According to some research, 65 percent of customers say they want to purchase from a brand that is eco-friendly and sustainable.  A lot of brands are already moving towards this and if it's possible to do so. I would recommend doing it not only for the environment but to increase sales as well you might lose a tiny bit of profit in the front end. Whether your packaging costs more or just different ways to make the product however this can be a big selling point. A lot of people will be looking for this and a lot of big companies are already doing this for example amazon pledge by 2040 they will have zero carbon emissions. This is something to kind of look into for 2021 to see if it's possible if it's worth doing if it makes sense because it is beneficial if the costs make sense.

 Product customization

 

Advanced product customization so right now you can have a product customized there's a lot of products that can be customized, but with more technology and 3d printing in the manufacturing process more there's a lot more ability to do. Last-minute customization or little advanced customization without it being a huge headache or a huge cost and is usually done towards the end of the production process. Or the checkout process but this is something that is growing and will soon become the norm.

Being able to customize the packaging of a product with your name or being able to customize a certain product. Because if you get a package with let's say shoes and they just say Nike on them great you got Nike shoes but what if they said tanner's Nikes or your name's Nikes it's a lot more of a custom and personal experience. So advanced customization is something to look into for 2021 as well so those are the trends that are going to be increasing and things you need to look out for in 2021.

WHAT TO EXPECT?

 

When it comes to e-commerce things to maybe think about with the mobile sales, how important that is SMS. I'd say SMS  and mobile-friendly are probably the two most important ones. If you are an e-commerce seller because everything is moving that way until almost everything will be mobile with phones being faster. Just how easy it is making sure you're mobile-friendly and using SMS is going to be critically important. Always prepare for the unexpected and unknown even if you think that these eCommerce trends will take off in 2021 or they've got a few years left preparing your sales marketing and fulfillment strategies for tomorrow's world of e-commerce will enable your business to keep up with the times or get ahead in the game.