Do you know that even after the Covid-19 pandemic & stores beginning to reopen physically, global eCommerce sales are expected to reach $5 trillion in 2022 and $6 trillion by 2024 & the eCommerce market is expected to grow by almost $11 trillion between 2021 and 2025? This is a fact! And post-pandemic normalization will not slow down the eCommerce growth globally.
That is great, right? But are you also aware of what it means? It means the eCommerce space is becoming more crowded both seller-wise and shopper-wise. Merchants continue to follow consumer demand online, flocking to eCommerce in record numbers.
Online stores are popping up daily, with an estimated 12–24 million eCommerce sites across the globe. This means more brands competing for customers. As a result, digital advertising will be more costly and less profitable than ever before.
The reasons for the huge growth of eCommerce can depend on many factors like Covid-19. Pandemic is a major reason. In times of Covid-19, stay-at-home policies have brought many changes in consumer behavior. A large number of eCommerce stores emerged in this period.
But do not worry! If you know the trends and take action regarding them, this can mean also an opportunity! Furthermore, if you run an eCommerce business on Shopify then you want to have your business compliant with the latest trends, don’t you?
Then, this article will provide you with what you should know to help to stay on top of current trends & competition. Thus, to keep your business compliant & fruitful!
Top eCommerce Trends To Follow in 2023
1. TikTok eCommerce Marketing
TikTok is a social media platform that releases short videos. It’s where you and influencers can express your individuality and drive brand awareness. So, we can easily say that it’s a popular platform for influencer marketing and brand social media marketing.
It has displayed tremendous growth by reaching 1.2 billion users in three years. It started as a short-form video-sharing platform geared toward younger audiences.
According to research from Adweek, nearly half of TikTokers make purchases from brands they see in the app.
With more than 173 million first-time installs across app stores in the last quarter of 2021 alone, it’s just as powerful as any other “big” platform. Over the years, eCommerce marketing on TikTok has evolved from hashtags trending to ad offerings.
TikTok also announced the launch of a self-serve advertising platform giving businesses and advertisers more creative freedom, budget flexibility, and access to audience targeting tools in 2020.
For eCommerce merchants, this is a good thing & at the same time more effort to take attention from them! No one is more familiar with shopping via multiple devices than Generation Z.
Gen Z is now shaping the future of eCommerce in a good way. From better online experiences to more engaging social interactions, Gen Z is changing how you position your online businesses and products.
That is why appealing to Gen-Z is crucial for eCommerce success & If you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, TikTok is the platform that you can reach this generation most easily. It is an especially useful tool—62% of its audience falls into the 10- to 29-year-old age group.
A. Define your audience
Describe what you can to paint a picture of the people most likely to convert into customers. You don’t have to define every detail of course but at least a frame is a must. This will be your target audience.
As I mentioned above, TikTok is a popular platform for Gen Z consumers, but they aren’t the only people who use TikTok. Take it also into account!
B. Understand the Platform
On TikTok, there is going to be your business competition for sure, and competition of content. TikTok is filled with people and brands similar to each other, so you will be competing against them.
Examine your business competitors and if they have a TikTok presence. And then, look at the types of things they post and the engagement level of different types of content they put.
This will show you a way on what their audience likes. Most importantly, always remember that creating your own unique content is crucial. Copying will be seeming as a repellent by users!
Then spend time looking at TikTok content itself to see what is already produced for your market. Search hashtags, join groups, look at trending posts, and look for topics relevant to your brand.
C. Define Your Promotion Strategy
In addition to spending time on creating TikTok profile of your business, and videos, you can boost your TikTok marketing with influencers and paid advertising.
Influencer marketing makes visible your brand & products to someone else’s audience. It will provide social proof for your products. This type of marketing is huge on TikTok.
Some Shopify merchants prefer to be partnered with influencers to promote their products by giving their products as gifts to TikTok influencers to be used in front of their audiences.
By doing this, they earn huge views, many likes & shares, and so many sales in a single day.
D. Become a Pro User to Get More Data
It starts with knowing what metrics to measure and why. Fortunately, Pro TikTok accounts offer content creators detailed analytics about their followers, traffic, and engagement. You can view data for things like:
- Weekly and monthly lookbacks at follower count
- Video views, playback time, likes, comments, and shares
- Traffic source
- Profile views
- Audience demographics like gender, location, age, etc.
- Other content your audience likes (videos and sounds)
- Your trending videos
You can also look at global data points like hashtag views and use the Discover tab to see what’s trending.
TikTok is a channel you can use to put your brand in front of a younger audience and continue to create content to keep them engaged and keep you top of mind. Knowing & keeping these data will take you forward in terms of your marketing activities.
2. Accessibility Features for Shoppers Who Has Disabilities
Do you know how many eCommerce consumers have disabilities? With nearly 15% of global citizens having a disability of some sort, & it means making your website accessible also increases your site's appeal to a sizable potential customer base.
This trend has started to increase its importance in 2023, & will definitely keep its importance in 2024, too.
Recently, merchants struggle to get their products shown clearly to disabled shoppers. It’s often very difficult to navigate the website.
Also for people with disabilities, it is usually difficult to know exactly what the product contains. With clothes, for example, a lot of disabled people have issues with texture, physically and allergy-wise. They need to know what the item is before even buying it.
Another point is that merchants also struggle to identify inaccessibility meaning it’s important to be able to identify where the accessibility errors are.
eCommerce business owners need to work on learning, training, and improving their online services to include people of all different abilities, especially the disabled.
With nearly 15% of global citizens having a disability of some sort, & it means making your website accessible also increases your site's appeal to a sizable potential customer base.
A. Offering More Information
You should use a variety of images and videos to show what the product is like and how it moves, as well as employ disabled models and models in sitting-down poses to show what the item would look like on someone in a wheelchair, for instance.
B. Having Good Customer Service
More communication is important. Have good customer service that will be able to help consumers who are not as used to online shopping. People with disabilities fall into this category often.
Additionally, you should improve filters and tags so that your website would be more informative for them. Clear return policies are also very important if a product arrives and there is a problem with the texture of the pattern for those with disabilities.
C. Implementing Assistive Technology
The first important thing that should be defined is web accessibility. You should raise this topic to all your company stakeholders and organize training for designers and employees to design a website according to those people.
3. Voice Shopping
Voice shopping has taken the front seat of eCommerce trends, especially in the COVID-19 period when 50% of online searches were done by using voice-enabled devices.
Exploring new channels to reach new audiences is crucial for you. Experimenting with new channels like voice shopping can act as a precaution against digital advertising uncertainty.
Global Shipments of smart speakers and displays grew 35% over the past year.
Regarding the future of eCommerce, voice shopping is reshaping the market and creating new opportunities for businesses to connect and interact with their customers.
As for the consumers, voice technology offers convenience as well as digital accessibility to people with visual and other forms of disabilities.
It is also a solution for shoppers who are visually disabled.
A. Creating Engagement: It creates an instantly engaging experience for your customers, thus, increasing customer retention.
B. Easy to Use: All your customers need to activate a device with a voice assistant and their own voice. It allows consumers to shop when they’re cooking, multitasking, or even driving.
Purchasing products will be much easier with hands-free voice shopping. Thus, it can boost your sales more quickly!
C. 24/7 Availability: Consumers can purchase using voice shopping every time a day, as they would with any web store, but voice technology also allows them to do so more easily and quickly without a lengthy of the purchasing process.
D. Personalizing Customers’ Experiences: Because of the ease of voice shopping, shoppers tend to interact more with their mobile phones. Devices like mobile phones can then gather more data from them, and you can easily use this data to personalize their customer experience.
If you collect information on your consumer behaviors & preferences, you can create powerful products and plan marketing strategies to be ahead of the game while delighting our customers constantly!
E. Providing An Easier Shopping Experience for Visually Disabled Customers: Implementing voice shopping is the perfect way to help your brand reach new audiences by making your site more accessible to more customers having visual disabilities.
4. Live Stream Shopping
E-commerce and consumer behavior are changing and being updated every day. Now it's time to talk about the most bullish & recent trend. Livestream shopping is one of the eCommerce trends in 2023 that has been gaining popularity globally.
“My prediction is that in a couple of years, the hottest role for a brand to hire is going to be a head of live shopping." Kevin Gould, Co-founder, Glamnetic
The digital shopping experience is no longer just about browsing on shopping apps and websites and adding products to the carts for consumers.
Merchants are now capitalizing on Livestream selling, a growing sales channel that combines product promotion and instant purchasing of featured products by the participating live audience.
Also, Livestream selling is popular among businesses that offer apparel, beauty, food, and electronic products.
Merchants host live selling events on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and TikTok which are also the platforms preferred by their audiences.
According to Shopify research, there is a 61% growth in Livestream selling app installs globally between January 1, 2021, and September 30, 2021, compared to the same period in 2020.
A. Providing a Digitalized Brick-and-Mortar Experience: If there is one thing that eCommerce has been missing, it is the physical vibe of shopping. Visiting a store is not simply about making a purchase, it’s an experience that involves human interaction.
Live streaming allows you to deliver the best of both worlds. Your customers can enjoy the comfort of their home, and at the same time virtually be at the shop and ask the host questions in real-time.
B. Providing Quick & Enormous Sales: The best thing about live shopping events is that they can help you generate enormous & fast sales. If you do your marketing campaign well, shoppers will know about it and will be looking forward to it.
All you have to do is to provide an attractive experience consumers want to share with others.
That’s why it’s so important to choose the right host for the event, it has to be someone who can fascinate people and make them want to buy what you’re selling.
C. Inspiring Sudden Buying Feeling: Livestream is a show. Moreover, it is a show the customer is involved in. People get excited because they feel like a part of something, it gives them a sense of belonging. And thus, they want to share it with their friends.
But Livestream shopping also inspires the fear of missing out that leads to a feeling of buying feeling suddenly.
People will want to buy the product while the eCommerce live event lasts not only because it might be discounted, but because they see other people buying it right now, in front of their eyes.
D. Building Brand Awareness: As it is mentioned above, Livestream shopping events are usually hosted by popular influencers or famous people. These public figures have a loyal audience of followers that more than often are willing to take their word for it when they recommend products.
So that people get aware of your brand & products easily.
5. Shoppable Video Ads
This emerging eCommerce trend is a form of interactive advertisement. Unlike regular video ads, this format of video advertisement includes clickable elements, which can be a product tag overlay or call-to-action.
These clickable sections can direct the audience to a landing page where they can learn more about the product featured in the ad. Furthermore, shoppable video ads can integrate add-to-cart features, which allow customers to purchase a product or service right from the video itself which is making your products easy to buy.
You should use shoppable video ads for clear conversion data to develop a better marketing strategy & the products that consumers are interested in more, including click-to-view, click-to-buy, and click-to-share interactions.
A. Creating Engagement: It creates an instantly engaging experience for your customers, thus, increasing customer retention.
B. Easy to use: All your customers need to activate a device with a voice assistant and their own voice. It allows consumers to shop when they’re cooking, multitasking, or even driving. Purchasing products will be much easier with hands-free voice shopping. Thus, it can boost your sales more quickly!
C. 24/7 Availability: Consumers can purchase using voice shopping every time a day, as they would with any web store, but voice technology also allows them to do so more easily and quickly without a lengthy of the purchasing process.
D. Personalizing Customers’ Experiences: Because of the ease of voice shopping, shoppers tend to interact more with their mobile phones. Devices like mobile phones can then gather more data from them, and you can easily use this data to personalize their customer experience.
If you collect information on your consumer behaviors & preferences, you can create powerful products and plan marketing strategies to be ahead of the game while delighting our customers constantly!
E. Providing An Easier Shopping Experience for Visually Disabled Customers: Implementing voice shopping is the perfect way to help your brand reach new audiences by making your site more accessible to more customers having visual disabilities.
6- Augmented Reality
The augmented reality trend is having a higher rank in the eCommerce industry for several years. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, AR has become one of the eCommerce trends COVID-19 has hyped. Merchants that utilize AR technology are able to offer their customers to try out their products virtually.
According to the data reported by Facebook’s AR partner, merchants that used AR technology in their online stores had a 90% conversion rate compared to those that did not use AR during the period of the pandemic.
Recently AR technology is turning into an important element of eCommerce as more shoppers lean toward immersive content. In fact, approximately 90% of Americans are already using or considering using AR to further enhance their shopping experience.
For example, Loreal now is giving chance to their customers to try hair colors on their faces & which converts more customers & boosts Loreal’s sales! Another example would be optic shops! Now most of them allow their customers to try colorful lenses on their eyes.
So you should definitely think about AR technology in your store because the only hesitation of consumers when they shop online is not to be able to try the items for themselves. With AR technology, you can remove this obstacle for your customers!
A. Creating Unique Customer Experience: The biggest advantage of Augmented Reality is creating unique digital experiences that mix the best of the digital and physical worlds.
The most common audio-visual experiences we know of exist either in the physical or in the digital realm. AR blends both realities at once. It places digital components & physical components thus creating a mirage effect on customers.
B. Increasing Consumer Engagement: When Augmented Reality first appeared, it was a technology for gaming & entertainment. However, over time, its focus has expanded wider that can deliver solid business gains. Increasing consumer engagement is one of the focuses.
Consumer engagement level has been always located at the first rank for eCommerce businesses in terms of its importance. It is a gateway to several other benefits. Brand loyalty is one of those benefits. It has countless gains for a growing business as well as an established business.
The challenge is in serving the right material at the right time to the use that will make them engage.
AR technology can be used in many ways such as scannable product labels, interactive ads, catalogs, & so on.
The novelty of the technology combined with its ability to deliver information in a quick and snackable way makes the shopping experience engaging for consumers.
C. A Game Changer For Disabled Consumers: This technology also stands to be a game-changer for approximately 190 million people worldwide experiencing significant disabilities, including visual impairment.
One of the major problems faced by disabled persons is the lack of independence, mainly when handling day-to-day affairs which is an area that AR can help to greatly improve.
For example, for shoppers who can't move their hands, AR smart glasses allow them to select and get detailed information about a product without having to touch it.
7. Omnichannel Chatbots
Customer interaction is crucial for online stores. So that having communication channels on more than one platform is very important for you. Surprisingly, only a small percentage of online businesses have adopted this technology.
In 2020, only 9% of eCommerce companies implemented Artificial Intelligent chatbots into their platforms, and 39% had no plans of doing the same thing.
From the consumer perspective, the number of customers feeling comfortable when they interact with chatbots has grown huge and with 80% of them claiming that communicating with chatbots has been a positive experience.
Recently, it is common for consumers to use multiple devices and platforms when shopping online.
According to a current study, having omnichannel customer communication can help increase not only the conversion rate but also the retention rate. That is why you should expand your communication channel to a variety of platforms which includes your targeted audience.
At this point, Shopify store owners can take advantage of using Shopney to turn their online stores into a mobile app. Shopney's in-app chat feature which is integrated with the Shopify Inbox app will be a great assistant.
It is one the greatest in-app-messages applications that enable store owners to offer discounts, share pre-prepared orders, and recommend other products to the shoppers via this app.
Merchants will be able to reach most of the platforms such as Facebook messenger & Instagram DM to communicate with their customers in just a single conversation page! In this way, merchants can convert more!
A. Improving Customer Experience: Better customer experience leads to more satisfied customers & these satisfied customers keep products/services relevant. They will be more loyal, spend more & are more likely to become your brand’s ambassadors.
B. Increasing Operational Efficiency: Communication platforms help to cut operational costs and also contribute value to your business. It is an investment that goes beyond cost-cutting to help safeguard your competitive position & potential future growth.
It will make your business more cost-efficient by making it more scalable. In addition to this, it will help to remove internal uncertainties by integrating with other systems & collaborate more effectively.
C. Mitigating Risks: It helps to reduce risks associated with regulatory compliance. Because they are flexible & adaptable, there is also less risk that they will become outdated in the future.
8. Conclusion
To be honest, we can’t predict the future. But keeping an eye on trends that drive eCommerce as a whole will help you avoid surprises & to stay at the top of the market.
If you know your enemy & yourself; you will be always winning.
These trends didn't just appear overnight. They developed over the course of years. But now they're at a point where eCommerce businesses have to take advantage.
Incorporating new strategies like Livestream shopping, TikTok marketing, AR technology, and so on for your eCommerce business will further increase sales in the coming years & help you to survive in this massive competition.
While it's important to not get distracted by every "shiny new thing" we see in marketing, these trends hint at what the future looks like for brands and consumers. The question is what's next?
