Author Bio : Rose Burg has been a Digitial Marketer for 6 years. She has designed websites, built brands and mastered social media in her time with EYStudios.com. An agency that is best at creating e-commerce experiences that will delight your customers and run circles around your competition.
Being an eCommerce business owner, it is critical to keep your eye on the future. Following trends, and keeping up to date on news, changes, technology, and industry standards is a must for success. So, what does the future hold for eCommerce? Have a gaze into the crystal ball to see what is in store for you and your eCommerce business.
Essentially, the use of smartphones to make purchases is slowly edging out the computer. People are becoming savvier with their phones and other mobile devices. Giving visitors to your site the option to buy from their phone easily is quickly becoming a must. As of November 2015, mobile purchases represented 50.3% of all online purchases, while computers dropped to 49.7%.
To compete with this, retailers are coming up with an alternative. By having their own website (sometimes with discounted pricing, but not always), they are offering customers a chance to search the items online, and then come into the store to make their purchase. This behavior is called “webrooming,” and is the opposite of showrooming.
Being an eCommerce business owner, it is critical to keep your eye on the future. Following trends, and keeping up to date on news, changes, technology, and industry standards is a must for success. So, what does the future hold for eCommerce? Have a gaze into the crystal ball to see what is in store for you and your eCommerce business.
Gone Mobile?
On April 21, 2016, Google sent the eCommerce world into a tizzy with their search algorithm changes. Referred to as “Mobilegeddon” in many SEO circles, it changed how Google displays the SERPs and gives mobile friendly websites a higher ranking. If this doesn’t give you an inkling into the future, nothing will.
Essentially, the use of smartphones to make purchases is slowly edging out the computer. People are becoming savvier with their phones and other mobile devices. Giving visitors to your site the option to buy from their phone easily is quickly becoming a must. As of November 2015, mobile purchases represented 50.3% of all online purchases, while computers dropped to 49.7%.
This trend is likely to continue and even explode over the next 4 years. The great thing about this is that it levels out the playing field for the commerce giants like Amazon and the small, specialized boutiques. The eCommerce market is wide open and ready for you to grab your slice of the pie.
RTB: Real Time Bidding
Online ads are becoming a huge part of eCommerce marketing plans, for obvious reasons. Have you ever noticed when you go on a particular website that the ads seem to be directed to your preferences?
For example, if you recently searched for day planners and visited several websites, that information is saved in your history. Then, when you go to a new site for something else, say email or news, ads along the side of the news site are for day planners and other items related to day planners.
This is a result of RTB or real-time bidding. It is incredibly fast, happening only within 100 milliseconds from the time you clicked on the news URL. The process is simple: Once you click on the site, a request is sent to an ad exchange which assesses your information, including demographic, browsing history, location, and the URL you selected. Within milliseconds, a bidding war happens for certain ads to be displayed on the URL you are visiting.
As your page loads, the winning ads are what you see in the margins of the site. The whole process is automated, and bidding amounts are set by the advertisers, so ads are in place—literally—in milliseconds. This is an ever-growing business, and one to keep your eye on if you choose to get into the advertising side of eCommerce. RTB revenue is expected to reach $26 billion by 2020. THAT is a massive business in and of itself.
Brick and Mortar Venture Online
With the decline of brick and mortar that retailers are currently experiencing, the need to stay alive is ever more powerful. One way to stay in business is to expand the business online. The critical piece here is that the website must be done right or venturing to the online market will fail miserably.
One of the trends that brick and mortar stores are battling against is customers coming in to choose what items they want … to then purchase online. Customers have effectively turned the tables on brick and mortar stores by using them as showrooms, and then purchasing the same item at a discounted price, online from home.
To compete with this, retailers are coming up with an alternative. By having their own website (sometimes with discounted pricing, but not always), they are offering customers a chance to search the items online, and then come into the store to make their purchase. This behavior is called “webrooming,” and is the opposite of showrooming.
Either way, these sites need to be mobile friendly and easy to navigate to be able to compete with the smaller eCommerce sites that have the online presence locked up, with excellent knowledge and experience for using analytics and data to hone their sites to perfection. However, there is one thing that brick and mortar stores have over solely eCommerce sites: Retailers will staff their sites just like they staff their stores, to offer that personal touch customer service.
The eCommerce industry changes rapidly, just like any other technology-driven business. eCommerce owners who keep a birds-eye view on the business trends will see how the future will unfold. Watching from 10,000 feet above allows you to see patterns and trends beginning to form, which gives you the upper hand in staying ahead of the curve and making the necessary changes to keep your eCommerce business successful and profitable.
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