What Is the Future of eCommerce in 2019?

The future of eCommerce looks like it’ll continue to go from strength to strength. Not only is it growing at more than 15% year over year, but it’s now become the most popular retail medium, with 51% of US consumers preferring to shop online.

eCommerce continues to evolve, and 2019 looks set to be no different. Here are some of the eCommerce technology trends that we’re most excited about and how online retailers can respond.

What Does the Future of eCommerce Look Like in 2019?

The rise of marketplace advertising

Google and other search engines have, for years, allowed businesses to place ads on their platforms which link to their products and services. An advert on Google, for instance, might connect to a seller on Amazon, boosting their visibility. But some sites, like Amazon, have now become so fundamental to the online retail environment that they will shortly offer sellers their own ad space.

future of ecommerceOur prediction for eCommerce trends in 2019 includes more ads opportunities on these platforms. Sellers on Amazon, for instance, may come to depend on paid promotions to gain visibility, and we could see a bidding system for page space, similar to the approach adopted by search engines.

As an online retailer, you may want to offer suppliers the opportunity to preferentially position their products on your pages, just like regular brick-and-mortar stores.

Better recommendation engines

Previous generation recommendation engines used knowledge about past purchases to recommend future products. But they had significant drawbacks: once you’d bought a fridge-freezer, for instance, it was unlikely that you’d want to buy another soon after.

eCommerce websites know that recommendation engines are potent tools to incentivize purchases, but they are hard to get right. New machine learning technologies, however, allow retailers like you to increase the sophistication of how you make recommendations without substantially increasing costs. Personalized shopping assistants, developers hope, will have more “common sense” and provide customers with bespoke recommendations based on a range of factors, not just what they’ve bought before.

The creation of online communities

eCommerce websites know that social media is a useful marketing tool. But they are yet to include the principles of social media in their own websites to encourage sales. The future of eCommerce, many believe, is the integration of social media with the shopping experience natively on eCommerce sites.

Warby Parker—a spectacles retailer—has already experimented in this arena. It provides a facility which allows its customers to share photos of themselves wearing the company’s glasses with the community. The idea is to recreate a regular shopping experience with friends, where customers receive input from their peers. Online retailers wanting to get ahead of this trend should act now and provide mechanisms for their customers to communicate with each other on their platforms.

Faster shipping

Online retailers know that shipping times are a significant obstacle to mass acceptance of their business model. Consumers are getting used to the idea that they might have to wait a couple of days for a package to arrive in the post, but they’d rather not.

In 2019 a flurry of companies may begin offering same-day shipping and delivery, beating out next-day delivery options in the convenience stakes. Customers will have to pay handily for the privilege, but better fulfillment technologies may soon make same-day possible.

Online retailers, therefore, need to focus on automating their fulfillment technology, reducing the amount of time it takes products to go from the warehouse and into the distribution network.

Discover How Quadshot Can Help

Get your site ready for the budding eCommerce trends of next year. We’ll help you design a WordPress site built for conversions. Learn more about our eCommerce website development services, then contact us today.

Get Your eCommerce Site Ready for the Holidays

For many online retailers, the holiday season is the busiest time of the year. It’s when shoppers let rip, using the disposable income they’ve built up during the year to splurge on gifts for loved ones. eCommerce websites experience additional traffic during this time, so it’s essential to make sure that your website is prepared for the onslaught. Here are some holiday ecommerce design ideas to get your site ready for the rush.

How to Improve Your Site’s Holiday eCommerce Design

Stress test your siteholiday ecommerce

Because so much of your annual revenue depends on the business you do over the holiday period, you need to stress-test your site well in advance to make sure that it can cope with demand. Third-party hosts can help you test your eCommerce website design and speed, telling you how much traffic it can manage without crashing, and informing you of any bottlenecks in user experience. Remember, for every half-second delay in loading a page, you could lose 10% of your customers.

You also need to make sure that your servers can scale. Good web hosts provide servers with automatic scripts that immediately increase server space in response to spikes in traffic.

Prime your audience to spend

Holiday eCommerce competition can be stiff. It’s imperative, therefore, to “prime” your audience to shop with you rather than your competitors. Priming begins early—right at the start of the festive season. Retailers need to offer their customers a compelling story about why they should shop with them. It could be anything, from special seasonal bulk buy discounts to clocks counting down to the last chance to order and receive before Christmas Day.

Get your payment systems working efficiently

Data from holiday shopping trends in 2018 suggest that this will be the busiest ever for eCommerce websites. Online retailers, therefore, need to make sure that their systems for getting paid work properly, even under high volume. Integrating sales data with accounting software can help retailers automate performance tracking and establish internal metrics for comparison in subsequent seasons.

Encourage early purchases

The last-minute rush before Christmas can be frantic. Online retailers often struggle to make a large volume of deliveries in the time available to them. It’s a good idea, therefore, to encourage customers to shop early. Send them gift ideas lists to their email. Entice them to buy earlier in the season using “Black” sale events. And provide special offers, like “free delivery” before the season to avoid any last-minute rush.

Test your holiday ads

Holiday advertising is necessarily different from the rest of the year. It needs to start early and persist throughout the holiday season. Retailers that begin A/B testing early tend to do better in the long-run, refining their messages and generating higher conversion rates.

Manage your security

The holiday period provides excellent opportunities for hackers to attack and bring down websites. Attackers can hide among the extra traffic, using bots to spam websites, slowing them down, or causing them to fail. Online retailers need to speak with their web host about strategies to prevent a site failure.

Get Your Site Ready for the Holidays and 2019 with Quadshot

The Quadshot Digital team is well-versed in the best practices for WordPress web design and eCommerce sites. Learn more about our services, then contact us to get more information on how we can help support your business.

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