The online space is constantly evolving with technology trends on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. Every new year brings on new trends and things you can do to position yourself for more success in the online and digital space.
eCommerce continues to grow as more people shift to an online buying experience. Even consumers who are still making purchases in-store are using online resources to research products before completing the purchase, making an online presence that much more important.
Here are 5 eCommerce trends in 2018 that you should know:
Social Media Optimization – Social media holds great importance in marketing in 2018. For eCommerce, many people get introduced to new products through social media, particularly Instagram and Pinterest posts. To get the most out of social media profiles and have them reach a larger audience to generate more traffic, ensure they are optimized.
Voice Search – With the creation of digital products such as Amazon Echo and Google Assistant, voice recognition is a more widespread phenomenon. These devices allow people to search for almost anything by just saying it out loud. With this new revolution in technology, eCommerce stores are able to take advantage. Optimizing your store for voice search is a popular trend that will drive additional traffic.
Chatbots – There are 1.3 billion users of Facebook Messenger, which tells you that the reach of online chatbots is at an all-time high. It is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of these features for marketing and promotion. For some larger companies, chatbots have not only been a way to promote a business or communicate with customers, but it has also been an additional way to complete orders. In the future, this will also become a more popular use of chatbots, so getting started and familiarized with these features now is advisable.
Easy Checkout – In today’s world, people want things to be quick and easy. In eCommerce, one way to do this is to make payment a seamless process. Payment options have opened the door to short-form checkout, slowing replacing the lengthy checkout process. Moving to one-click checkout options will make the process quick and easy for users.
ROPO – ROPO stands for research online, purchase offline. What this tool does for business owners is help them get an understanding of how well their digital advertising is helping with offline sales and activity within a store. This growing trend of the eCommerce industry helps track information from social media, geolocation details, mobile payments, in-store inventory and more to show how well digital advertising is working so business owners can create more targeted campaigns.
For more information on eCommerce trends, continue reading the Genius eCommerce blog for more updates. Our goal is to keep you informed and up to date on the latest eCommerce news.