Essential E-Commerce Trends to Watch for in 2016

Are you ready to achieve all of your business goals in 2016? Things are starting to take shape in the business world and there are already some clear trends that can help business owners get better results during the rest of the year. When you are an entrepreneur, it’s essential to think about your business, where it stands, how it progresses and how it can adapt to the market changes, technology advancements, etc. If you want to achieve great results this year, you will have to focus and consider certain trends.

Being in e-commerce business can get really hard, and there is a lot of work to be done in order to achieve success. However, the bright side is that there has never been a better time in the history of e-commerce to run this kind of business. Online sales are constantly growing and they are expected to grow even further, but if you want to catch this incoming wave of new customers, you will have to make certain preparations. To help you achieve this, we have collected the relevant e-commerce trends you will have to consider during the rest of the year.

1.    The improved shopping experience for mobile customers

The recent growth of the e-commerce market is mostly due to the growth of mobile consumers. In the past, there were many challenges and obstacles that businesses faced for getting customers to buy through their tablets and smartphones, but now that these obstacles have been surpassed, new opportunities for e-commerce profits arise.

Long lasting difficult checkout processes are finally simple and quick. The bottom line is that you won’t be able to convince people to buy something from your store if the process includes more than a few clicks or taps.

Furthermore, a number of retailers have already recognized this opportunity to optimize their services for mobile consumers even further by including live chat support. By implementing this feature, they will be able to instantly create a connection with their customers. If you offer consumers consistent and reliable advice on their mobile devices, the chances of them becoming loyal customers increase drastically.

This whole deal will have a massive impact on brick-and-mortar shops that also include an e-commerce aspect. It is important to build an optimized and functional e-commerce store, so that anyone can do their shopping quick and easy, and this is why you should find a reliable e-commerce development company.

Mobile consumers are going to dominate the year 2016 and the years to come, and this s why e-commerce businesses that want to stay on top will have to get the most out of this trend.

2.    Personalization will be replaced by context

Personalized shopping has become a norm in a very short period of time. Although there are many upsides to data-based personalization and consumers appreciate the suggestions given to them, there are still many consumers out there who get annoyed when a product they checked out on an e-commerce site follows them for next couple of months just because they looked at it once. No matter what amount of interest they had in that product, it continues to bother them on social networks and it simply won’t go away.

Retargeting can be a very effective method, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that context is taken into account. The original idea behind this was that, if someone becomes a member of a certain e-commerce site, the site will remember what kind of preferences that consumer had. And, those exact personalized experiences are also now offered to people who are not logged in or even registered on that site.

This means that there will be less friction for the customer’s shopping experience. Your e-commerce store can help customers make a decision in buying by giving them the content they need at the right time. A good example of this technique is when different sales copies are displayed to different people, depending on their interests and preferences.

This means that personalization is slowly being replaced with contextual shopping, while customers will receive more interesting content than ever before.

3.    Real-time analysis

Data is an essential resource when it comes to determining how well your business is performing. Unfortunately, the traditional analytic tools weren’t able to effectively spot problems or trends, and the whole thing was a time-consuming and intensive process that required a whole team in order to get the valuable data on time.

Furthermore, the traditional style analytics were also slowing things down because they didn’t give you the option to instantly give assistance to customers before they left your store. This is where there is a huge gap in analytics and doing this in real-time could drastically change the whole game.

While you monitor shopper and customer behavior, you can easily notice if there are any problems in your whole sales process. The problem could consist of various things such as coupon codes or checkout irregularities.

This is how you can lose a lot of sales. However, when you are able to fix these issues on the fly or communicate with a certain customer before he leaves your shopping cart, the conversion rate of your e-commerce store will improve significantly. By tracking shopping experiences in real-time, you will give customers a holistic experience, resolving their issues instantly, so that they can leave your site satisfied.

4.    Implementing video marketing

For years, it has been known that optimized, comprehensive product descriptions and professional photographs are very important for e-commerce stores. Making sales is about have good products, but it’s also about presenting them appropriately by attracting attention. There are a lot of fish in the pond, and making your products stand out with distinctive content is very important if you want to make sales. Being up to date and remaining competitive in the e-commerce business is one of the key advantages.

But, now there are a lot of businesses that are taking the whole thing to another level, using branded, custom made video content. Video content is becoming more popular every day as it builds trust with customers and attracts a lot of attention.

Informative, educational and entertaining product videos are the next big thing. They deliver engaging stories that can convey your message and bring your products closer to your customer’s needs. E-commerce experts are considering the value of implementing live streams, production videos, product showcases and demonstrations as legit strategies for increasing conversions.

Videos can help your site in many ways such as increase its SEO, make relevant information more available, boost conversions and make the content more sharable, leading to attracting more traffic.

There are a lot of e-commerce businesses that have worked on building a large YouTube subscriber base. Some other businesses focused on using other visually appealing apps, like Vine or Instagram, to attract attention of their target audiences. There are a lot more options for creating and delivering high quality video content and spark interest in the minds of your customers.

5.    Multi-channel selling is a slowly becoming a must

Whenever a customer finds a product they’re interested in, there’s a great chance that he or she will also search for the product on some of the major stores like Amazon or Etsy. When you have a product on your own e-commerce site and on sites that offer selling your products for a percentage of each sale, it means that you are performing multi-channel selling.

The biggest reason why a lot of people like to check out these huge multi-vendor sites is because it gives them the option of having a lot of unique products from different sellers to choose from. And, what’s even better is the fact that they will only have to make a single payment in the end. Furthermore, depending on the shopper’s location he or she might find other delivery services provided from different sites to be more suitable to them.

Some people will feel more secure when they buy a product from Amazon rather than from you site, simply because it’s a big brand that people feel can be trusted. This is something that e-commerce sellers have recognized as benefits for their stores, as they can reach bigger crowds by making multi-channel sales. However, multi-channel selling is becoming a must, as independent e-commerce sites are starting to have problems selling items if they don’t have their product listed on sites such as Etsy or Amazon.

2016 is certainly one exciting year for those in the e-commerce business. Businesses are getting innovative in their efforts to remain competitive and the rules for attaining greater exposure are getting wider and wider. However, don’t forget that innovating is not about investing a lot of money into something.

In most cases, people who want to invest a lot of money are the ones who lack creativity, and it’s not about investing a lot in existing channels, but rather in thinking outside the box and creating new channels that nobody even knows about.