While not all of them are recent, there are some that will hit the industry for the first time.

Let’s get on with what 2019 has in store for us.

Progressive Web Apps Transform the UX

It’s time to blur the distinction between eCommerce websites and apps; it’s time for PWAs (progressive web applications). This is the new standard of going about the dual business of capturing your audience on the web as well as on mobile. PWAs are best of both worlds and the worst of neither.

We’re talking about 10 times faster load time, offline capabilities, push notifications, and much more. With these, brands can achieve a native-like experience while removing the need to make a separate mobile app in addition to a desktop app.

The Imperative

The world is quickly shifting to PWAs, since they are native-like and don’t have the downside of cross-platform apps, and so should you.

Voice Search and Home Assistant will Become Mainstream

Shortcuts just got shorter with voice search (Siri, Google Assistant) and assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Homepod, etc. According to The Verge, “39 million Americans reportedly own a voice-activated smart speaker”

These are adding one more channel to omnichannel eCommerce that is operating full-throttle already. The Voice savvy customer experience has already taken over the American market. According to Voicebot.ai, the sale of food takeaways, groceries, books, and homecare items through voice-activated devices are very much happening and inspiring new customers to take this route.

The Imperative

Integrating voice search into your website and app and optimizing them is your next step. 

The easiest way to get into the smart home voice assistant market right now is to launch an Alexa Skill. Choose a headless digital experience platform to add this new channel and manage it constantly.

SaaS eCommerce Rules the Roost

Talking of saving time, it is speed and stability that are going to be your saving grace. Saas ecommerce platforms are going to grant you that. Take a cue from the best ecommerce brands like Amazon.

The advantage is that SaaS eCommerce popularity will cause (in fact, is causing) providers to keep on adding better features, resulting in better sales and marketing management.

The Imperative

SaaS is becoming more popular than ever, and so there is no better time to join it. As new channels of eCommerce sales emerge, SaaS is just the eCommerce model that’s going to give you an edge. If you haven’t taken note of this rising ecommerce trend already, please do, and please execute.

Shoppable Videos are the New Face of eCommerce

Yes, video was among the top eCommerce trends of 2018, but the storm that video created continues to disrupt the eCommerce space. It is estimated that videos will fetch around 80% of total web traffic this year.

Brands have now taken a fancy to videos and are experimenting with videos in the form of short brand films, animation, product videos, FAQs, and even testimonials, thus strengthening their brand message through interactivity and engagment. Videos are also proving to be instrumental in increasing conversion rate and reducing the order return rate.

The Imperative

Video is one of the most important current trends in eCommerce that you cannot afford to leave unexplored. Be creative and use videos to strike a connection with your customers. Break from the beaten path and see how you can use video to set your products apart from the crowd.

Image Search

This one is an entire game changer in the custom eCommerce development niche, and the eCommerce market as a whole. This trend will set apart image search enabled eCommerce applications from the ones that aren’t.

It is one of those recent trends in eCommerce that will empower users. It will allow the user to refine search as much as possible in contrast to the keyword-based search where the query results are only as accurate as the user’s ability to describe a product. The engine’s recommendations for viewing similar items also point to the “don’t make me think” rule.

The Imperative

Integrate image search functionality to your web and mobile app to make search more user-friendly and boost keyword search by providing users a context to make better searches.

B2B will Be More Like B2C

This time around, it’s the turn of B2B eCommerce to grow by leaps and bounds like B2C. The proliferation of new digital channels will expand the markets for B2B eCommerce and make the outreach to the target audience. The state of B2B eCommerce in 2018 has been encouraging and is likely to be even better in 2019.

According to Forrester,

“By 2020, B2B eCommerce is estimated to grow to $1.1 trillion and contribute 12.1 % of total B2B sales in the US.”

The Imperative

B2B is certainly growing like B2C. Expand your horizon and think about the newer channels that you could use to reach your target audience. Develop a strategy for the same. Take a cue from Alibaba. Consider your business customers as individual customers in terms of catering wholesome shopping experiences.

Pay Like You Want – Newer Payment Methods Like Cryptocurrency Soar

Cash on delivery is almost passe now, and a spectrum of payment method options rule the eCommerce space. Apart from debit and credit cards, users are now becoming comfortable with instant layby (ZipPay, Afterpay) and digital wallets like Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc..

And it’s time to familiarize yourself with cryptocurrency (Bitcoin). It is certainly one of the new trends in eCommerce.

All these newer payment method options have empowered the customer to buy with or without a deposit at that particular point in time, helping them achieve instant gratification with the least friction.

Long forms slow down the conversion process; quick payment methods speed it up by more than 20%.

The Imperative

Integrating better, modern, payment methods, is not a choice. It’s the norm, while cryptocurrency is a choice that you may want to consider. Who knows, it may figure among the list of eCommerce trends 2020.

The bottom line is to empower your customers with a seamless purchasing process.

The Love for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Gets Deeper

Creating more focused and fulfilling experiences, as well as more successful marketing campaigns, is what I am talking about. Artificial intelligence, as well as machine learning, works towards this goal.

Both artificial intelligence and machine learning are the force behind chatbots and recommendation engines. With them, customer segmentation becomes easy and allows you to analyze customer behavior and preferences to make product and offer recommendations for a personalized experience, apart from allowing you to automate customer service.

One use of machine learning that not many businesses take into account is identifying anomalies in the mounds of data that eCommerce procures from customers and sales. Fraud detection is one great use of machine learning in eCommerce.

The Imperative

Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with these eCommerce technology trends that are going to rule the future of eCommerce, beginning with adding chatbots and recommendation engines.

AR and VR are Ready to Change the Game

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are blurring the lines between the physical and the virtual and enabling customers to explore products outside of brick-and-mortar stores like never before.

Brands like Walmart are already investing generously in AR for providing out of the ordinary browsing and shopping experiences to their customers while they are in the consideration phase.

IKEA, in fact, took it to the next level with its app called Space which lets you use AR to place furniture into your space so you can decide if it’s the right choice and the right fit.

While AR is pretty much progressing and easier to implement by eCommerce companies, VR is still in its nascent stage, but is now finding ample use in the travel and real estate industries.

VR is now able to offer a 360-degree teaser view of the place that customers are looking to visit. Customers looking to buy or rent a property can have an inside look without having to be there in person. Best Western is actually implementing VR in their chain of hotels.

The Imperative

While the idea is tempting and this new eCommerce trend might just become the norm soon, the imperative right now is to find a use case for AR and VR for your business.

Customer Services is Better Automated with Chatbots

Chatbots are moving at full throttle and are on their way to becoming a staple in eCommerce website development. Much as users love to solve a problem with a simple chat, AI is coming to the rescue to save users from getting engaged (often for a long time) on phone calls with support people. Chatbots resolve the same problems in less time and with much fewer resources.

Chatbots, contrary to some, are not depersonalizing customer service, but are actually streamlining it in a much better way than humans can. They are great at finding the right answer for queries and grievances, and also for connecting customers to the right support people when needed.

The Imperative

Invest in automating your customer service through chatbots. They are the best way of not only saving your customer’s time but also providing a personalized experience.

Personalized Experience Persists

According to research by Dynamic Yield, “9/10 shoppers believe that mobile shopping experiences can be improved.”

Personalization is just that key you need to unlock your customers’ emotions. Personalization isn’t a new idea. It was, in fact, one of the top ecommerce trends of 2018. And incidentally, Amazon has attributed around 35% of their total sales revenue to the product recommendations that its engine makes to its customers.

Most of your prospective customers are keen on saving time in their busy lives. They‘d rather choose a way to shop that saves effort and gives them what they need in a jiffy.

When a majority of customers think that eCommerce websites and apps could offer them better experiences, personalization is the rule of thumb rather than a trend you should follow.

The Imperative

Providing personalized experiences in the form of product and offer recommendations, based on the customer’s journey, preferences, and behavior is the way to go in attracting and retaining customers.

The Takeaway

eCommerce, in this decade, has grown by leaps and bounds, especially with the spike in the number of mobile device (smartphones in particular) users. As the trends in digital devices and user behavior change, so do the trends in eCommerce.

Getting on board with these 2019 eCommerce trends can do a lot to attract and keep your customers. Keep on top of these trends and keep experimenting.

The post Top eCommerce Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2019 appeared first on SiteProNews.

When it comes to major sales holidays, few events can make or break the viability of eCommerce stores quite like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

News dating from 2017 (Reuters) stated that according to Adobe Analytics, US retailers made sales worth $7.9 billion during Thanksgiving and Black Friday in 2017, which is around 18% more than what they earned from the Black Friday 2016. The Cyber Monday 2017, on the other hand, made $6.59 billion in sales and was, by far, the biggest U.S. online shopping day to date, which is again a 17% increase from 2017.

We may safely deduce from these figures that failing to take the holiday season seriously, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday, can lead to lost revenue and sales potential.

To help you avoid this unwanted outcome, we’ve compiled a comprehensive checklist that aims to improve your omnichannel eCommerce experience across your official website, mobile app, kiosks, other devices, and even in-store amenities.

With this guidance, there’s no reason why you can’t make the most out of this year’s Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday sales rush.

1. Provide Your Sales Audience with Product and Service Information as Soon as Possible

“40% of customers begin researching and doing their holiday shopping as early as October.” – Corey Ferreira, Shopify

Digital consumers start scouring branded sites for information about best Black Friday deals even before the holiday season begins. So, you need to be prepared for this incoming traffic that starts well before the events.

During the lead up to this holiday shopping season, you should incorporate the following improvements to your site, in order to ensure  that digital customers have an experience that is conducive to setting up a purchase once your Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale begins:

• Revamped product information pages
• Conspicuous and easily understood homepage navigational buttons
• Pop-out overlay windows that trigger in accordance with consumer activity and interest
• Once your site is upto the mark and ready to provide these “early bird” shoppers with the information they crave, be sure to let them know about these improvements via your email contact list, social media profiles, and other channels that funnel into your greater digital customer experience.

2. Plan out Your Sales a Week Before the Event

When we talk about sharing this information with your digital following, a part of getting ahead of the curve comes in the form of planning out sales and promotions at least a week before the arrival of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even Thanksgiving.

“Look at all of your products and plan your sales ahead of time instead of putting on a sale last minute.” – Corey Ferreira, Shopify

One of the best ways to go about this process is via a “planned sales map,” ensuring that the digital customer experience flows smoothly once the wheels for this holiday sale are in motion. Creating a grid that covers the following sales details can help simplify this process significantly. Make sure you include:

• Sale Items
• Regular Price
• Sale Price
• Sale Date Start
• Sale Date End
• Sale Type
• Promotional Angle
• Additional Notes

Naturally, this is just a baseline in terms of an organizational approach. Your brand can always add to or remove from this grid of information as needed.

3. Test Your Site for its Ability to Handle the Incoming Surge of Traffic

Once you have these interested shoppers flooding your site, it’s vital to the success of your holiday season campaign that the digital backbone of your domain is able to handle this surge of traffic. Otherwise, you run the risk of facing the worst digital customer experience nightmare possible – a crashed or unresponsive site during the biggest sale event of the year.

Before the big rush on your website/app begins, test out your server load capacity by connecting with your trusted team of eCommerce development experts or via a performance testing tool. Two of the best options on this front include Loadimpact.com and Blitz.io.

Loadimpact.com offers a free server test that gauges the durability of your standard desktop and mobile sites.

Blitz.io offers similar testing capabilities, all from a cloud-based platform. Once your test is complete, the team behind this tool can provide you with an in-depth analysis that covers the particulars of software stacks, hardware resources, and related service providers.

4. Think Mobile First and Ensure Your Mobile Experience is Functional across Multiple Devices

According to a report by Statista, as of 2018, U.S. mobile retail commerce sales form around 40% of total U.S. ecommerce retail sales. This is projected to be around 54% by 2021. Evidently, thinking mobile first is not only important but also inevitable.

Also, with such increase in demand from mobile users, ensuring your mobile offerings are consistent and functional across numerous devices is also a big aspect of the digital customer experience for the holiday ecommerce season.

As pointed out by Rachel Sprung from HubSpot Blog, your brand can offer a great mobile digital customer experience by incorporating the following “on-the-go” optimization techniques and assets into its mobile site:

• Large, easily clickable buttons
• Simple and straightforward navigational paths
• Clickable menus that expand when needed
• Smart usage of images and graphics that don’t detract from load times and touchscreen interaction

And not just this, it’s also important to optimize experience across platforms – primarily, iOS and Android – to ensure that your target audience is not missed. A grid design plan for your app can help on this front.

You must also ensure consistency in app features on both platforms, at the same time keeping the user interface as well as the user’s convenience in mind.

5. Go High on Advertising Holiday Sales with Graphics

Create a visual experience for your users. Adding sale banners and/or changing the header image on the homepage is an extremely effective way to keep your audience informed, and even better, curious.

Brands, such as Amazon, use these graphics most intelligently to keep their users coming back for holiday season sales.

6. Keep your Social Media Followers Informed and Engaged

In terms of elevating your omnichannel experience to a position that stands as the gold standard of your industry, a few aspects must never be overlooked. A well-thought-out social media management strategy is one of them.

As Jaxon Lam of the Hootsuite blog explains, customers are more likely than ever before to make a purchase based on how you conduct yourself within these digital channels.

Grabbing the attention of your followers and creating a great digital customer experience on these networks starts with promoting your holiday sales early and often. Much like the early bird site visitors, your social audience craves early access to these promotions. So drum up some interest by teasing out these Cyber Monday/Black Friday online deals as social exclusives.

Incorporate trackable links and calls-to-action (CTAs) within these promotional posts to funnel traffic back to your site. Aside from helping to bridge the gap between your social and website experiences, this practice also helps your brand gather highly-valuable consumer data that can help refine future marketing operations and enhance retargeting efforts.

Finally, be as engaging as possible. Actively answering users’ questions and replying to comments shows your audience that your organization is willing to make the social portion of the digital customer experience a value-driven and an interactive affair during this (or any other) holiday sales season.

7. Integrate Live Chat Functionality when Possible

Today, customers demand more in terms of expedient responsiveness than even what social media chats have to offer. In this case, the key to keeping your customer experience at peak levels, comes in the form of integrating live chat functionality within your various digital channels.

Having a response at the ready and being able to answer customer questions in real time, are powerful additions to your site or app and could serve as the difference between securing a sale and facing another wasted opportunity during the Black Friday online shopping sales surge.

This is where chatbots come to the rescue. Chatbots are, in fact, revolutionizing CRM. With AI making such immense advances that benefit so many aspects of a business including customer relationship management, chatbots are the most close-at-hand application of AI that businesses can use to their advantage.

8. Plan for Capturing Lost Sales and Abandoned Carts via Email Marketing Retargeting

One of the most overlooked facets of a great digital customer experience is understanding and accepting the fact that even the best sales deals will leave some shoppers on the fence. However, by acknowledging this reality, your brand can plant the seeds for a smart and effective plan that aims to convert these uncertain digital customers.

A surprising fact from Brilliance – the mobile cart abandonment rate during Black Friday sales witnessed an increase of 15.9% in spite of improved US and overall shopping experience.

The best way to go about this process is via an email marketing campaign, that shows those customers who abandon their carts on your website; that your brand does care about its business; and that it is dedicated to providing an intertwined and cohesive omnichannel experience.

If you plan on remarketing to cart abandoners during Black Friday, you need to understand that timing and acceptance are the two key factors, which can make or break this strategy:

Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday have shorter purchase cycles than usual sales, it’s perfectly fine to send 2 to 3 emails over 2 to 3 days.

Keeping this interaction to one or two emails total and accepting the fact that not every remarketing effort will end in a sales conversion, ensures that your brand doesn’t come off as overbearing or “spammy.”

9. Build an In-store Experience that Completes the Omnichannel Digital Customer Experience

Part of providing a great digital customer experience on Black Friday comes from blurring the lines between your brick-and-mortar store and your online products and services on various devices and interfaces.

Sample devices and in-store kiosks that show off the features and functionality of your mobile app or site are a great way to immerse these customers in the digital experience, all while enhancing their ability to garner information about your products and services.

Additionally, requests for online feedback after a sale, as well as harvesting customer email addresses, allows your brand to lay the foundation for repeat site traffic and a growing email marketing contact list. To maximize the potential of this approach, it is important to invest in customer journey optimization for omnichannel retail.

Understanding customer journeys through customer analytics is the key to managing an omnichannel setup. Because how customers interact and deal with digital channels is dynamic and extremely demanding, especially during holiday sales. The aim should be to meet their needs right when they need, and more importantly, where they need.

10. Track or Measure the Success of Your Digital Customer Experience Improvements

One of the biggest mistakes your brand can make when it comes to optimizing its Black Friday/Cyber Monday digital customer experience is in assuming that the process ends once shoppers have wrapped up their transactions at the digital checkout.

In reality, maintaining the holiday season eCommerce checklist is a never-ending and constantly evolving commitment to providing the best services and features possible to your audience.

Thankfully, tracking sales numbers, engagement on social media, in-store and online customer surveys, etc., provide your business with valuable insights into the digital customer experience.

Consider keeping an eye on the following metrics during this holiday season:

• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
• Customer Complaints

The insights offered by these metrics and feedback can serve as the basis for future optimization and continued refinement, thereby ensuring that each holiday sales season is better than the last for your business.

Conclusion

The holiday season is just around the corner. Make sure you have a plan in place to make Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best time of the year for your business.

From merging functionalities and services across multiple channels to preparing for next year’s Black Friday frenzy, creating a great digital customer experience requires plenty of time, effort, investment, and energy. However, the benefits and gains of truly winning over your audience during this crucial period is well worth all the hard work that goes into this process.

The post The Essential eCommerce Checklist for Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2018 appeared first on SiteProNews.