Ecommerce Predictions for 2018 - What You Need to Know

Hope you are getting well since the start of the year.

Individual freelancers and online store owners over the globe are constantly looking to the future. To shape their services accordingly.

Let us enjoy some data-driven facts to make this text non-boring.

"Brazil is the largest e-commerce economy in Latin America at $20 billion."

"Digital payments are improvising and have become more secure."

Constantly evolving are ecommerce new trends.

For any retailer, small or enterprise business, knowing modern trends in ecommerce industry are important because it will decide their ecommerce marketing strategy for this year.

Considering same, I have compiled this non-speculative, real-world’s figures based article on ecommerce predictions 2018.

Presented here are top 10 ecommerce trends sorted after a depth research.

With them, I am sure you will get ahead of the competition.

While Ecommerce itself is no different, these tactics collaboratively support you to stay in the know and empowered - well beyond 2018.

To keep laser focus, I have elaborately included all trends, such as

Global Ecommerce Predictions

Ecommerce Predictions concerning User-Experiences

Mobile Ecommerce Predictions

Magento Ecommerce Predictions

Global Ecommerce

As more people now-a-days prefer to shop online, Ecommerce is booming. Perhaps because it allows to buy right from the comfort of the home.

In recent years, this industry has grown rapidly while just in its nascent stages of development.

Prediction 1 - By end of 2018, 70% of eCommerce traffic will come from mobile devices.

mCommerce is going viral.

Currently, it is at 19% stake of total ecommerce sales.

Adobe, a famous technology company has proved by statistics that

more than 16 million people have purchased

via smartphones

from

1st November, 2017 to

10th December, 2017

In the USA alone.

Especially, availability of fingerprint and facial recognition has given a huge leap to mobile shopping security.

Time For Action

Considering latest mobile shopping trend that is steadily on the rise – your business website must be optimized for both -

mobile responsive layout

mobile friendly user experience

Ideally, you should keep Progressive Web Apps to streamline user-friendliness between desktop and cell phone.

In case your budget is fevered at the moment, hold at least an attractive, screen neutral website. You can develop the mobile app after a couple of months later. This holds true for any business unit regardless of industry and sector.

MagentoGuys is one company that provides featured ecommerce websites for all industries and tailored ecommerce apps at economic rates of development.

Prediction 2 - Transparency of Internet will dramatically increase B2C Ecommerce

Yes, it is from study of Statista, a world-recognized market research company, not my personal statement.

In 2017, Business-to-Business(B2B) sales remained roughly 3 times higher than Business-To-Consumer deals.

But people are now freely and easily getting insights for purchasing process. Due to open nature of the web.

As a result, the market sizes are gradually shifting in favour of B2C’s self-service idea.

What You Can Do

Create directly end user-facing web pages on your ecommerce website.

Just like what Dell has done - where visitors can select configurations and set ultimate price to design a laptop on their own.

This keeps business away from starvation as consumers can contact manufacturer without agencies in the middle. This technique discovers a whole new group of buyers.

Prediction 3 - More Americans Are Purchasing from Overseas and Happy with Virtual Shopping

From 2016 UPS survey, more than half - 51% of American shoppers prefer to buy online.

Physical storefronts are facing great competition and have left behind.

Online alternatives serve comprehensive information and attainable chat by human representatives.

What You Can Do

If you are a kind of business who has an opportunity to sell in Americas, search for suitable transportation mediums to achieve the same.

Collaborate with courier companies. Extend your feet in American markets.

57% of USA individuals regularly buy from overseas countries, enlist your business in it.

Draw USA facing

website version and

mobile apps

with

appropriate SEO settings.

Prediction 4 - Over 50% of All Ecommerce Web Stores will utilize Cloud in 2018

Cloud benefits are clear and so it is getting adopted fast professional units.

Cloud platforms allow non-technical persons to rise on digital platforms with minimum hurdles.

Take for example, tens of more websites are being added every day using SaaS services like Shopify, Prestashop, Squarespace, WiX etc.

They are great for building quickly. They offer structured and shared data management. e.g. Google Drive

With them, even a small vendor can perform against enterprise size business by delivering unmatched user experiences and volumetric data.

Forrester predicts that 50% of all global shops will use one or more public cloud platforms by late 2018.

Time For Action

Using cloud does not mean having a SaaS-oriented or paid account web portal strictly.

You can benefit from free services like

OneDrive

Social Media Accounts

Freemium accounts on previously mentioned - WiX, Weebly sites

Instagram photo sharing of products

Google Business Plus page

etc.

Presence on these platforms reflects that your professional offerings are cloud friendly.

Prediction 5 - Most Businesses will use Chatbots

45% shoppers prefer chatbots as a mode of customer service.

People expect quick, instant answers and that is provided by intelligent Chatbots.

They are less likely to wait for hours to get services from a business when too many analogous sellers exist.

Further, a cost for implementing chatbots has become affordable for merchants.

We ourselves, have seen an increase in the use of messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat and Facebook Messenger in the last decade.

Time For Action

You can get AI (Artificial Intelligence) based chatbot developed that responds to prospect who wants to talk with your business phone number’s WhatsApp or when a message is dropped on facebook messenger.

According to Business Insider, a market research company, 80% of all businesses intend to implement chatbots by 2020.

Prediction 6 - Marketing Emails are Getting Even Shorter

Email marketing campaigns with rich graphics and brief content get responded.

Concisely crafted messages for advertisement are read by mobile users.

If you write pricing, at least ‘Starts At $X’, it doubles brand trust.

Current, 2018 trend is to design emails containing only single infographics as its all-in-all content for business promotion, that is perfect fit instead 500 words plain text.

If your customer-facing mails are boring, make them compact now.

Prediction 7 - Huge Emphasis on Personalized Shopping Experience

Although website owners are in constant dialogue around improving user-experience, only a handful of them apply personalization.

It is the key to succeed in the saturated marketplace.

Audience segmentation and targeted ad campaigns deserve special attention.

Show right set of products at right time to right age of horde, not otherwise it is going to make ROI.

94% of marketing experts agree that personalized content is critical to connect with prospects.

If it seems hard to generate personalization-

It may turn complicated to do on your Ecommerce site.

Don’t try to do it yourself, hire an ecommerce developer or buy a plugin.

If you hold Magento based portal, competitive developers are available at quite reasonable rate like USD $8-$10 to get you everything.

For others, authentic sourcing is required to make sure you don’t pay the extravagant amount of money to bring advantage of specific personalization functionality on the website.

Prediction 8 - Local Mobile-Searches becoming Impactful

61% of total mobile users call after searching a business/professional entity.

Moreover, 59% of all mobile searchers visited the physical storefront.

Sounds lucrative?

These are just highlights indicating how imperative it is for a business to adjust local SEO settings.

Mobile-first approach adopted by business gets its pages better indexed in Google and it can be conveniently found by mobile-users.

Time For Action

Check your mobile web pages yourself in different browsers, operating systems and screen sizes.

Ask yourself whether you would buy from this site if you were a visitor?

Have you completed Google and Bing verification of business office address?

Have you inserted city-included SEO keywords, TITLEs and METAs in website?

Technology innovation and experiences reveal that flat design pages are neat and appeal to interact. Clients don’t like to see cluttered screens packed with ad pop-ups.

As an example, you might look into an IONIC mobile app to get an idea about perfect UI/Ux design.

Prediction 9 - Video Marketing To Dominate

Online buyers have less patience.

Quality videos are verily seen by prospects instead reading content.

And this isn’t a new idea.

Yet, you don’t have to publish videos of your corporate team.

People are interested to see application demonstration of your products.

Video for Each Product

Supplement and produce short videos on your website, YouTube, Vimeo etc. to market better. Showcase usage of product, its side angles etc.

It might be time consuming and lengthy process to create a video for 6,000 products individually. But it works.

Prediction 10 - Analytics Upgrades for Data-Driven Action

Ecommerce store success builds over months and years.

You need to track and capture various geographic areas from where visits are coming.

Analytics is vital to understand the target audience, their mindset and weak sections of website.

Apart from Google Analytics

For extra fees, Magento Inc. offers Business Intelligence Toolkit that you can integrate with ecommerce site to turn insights into sales.

That’s it.

I hope reading above text has been fruitful for you and hasn’t been a waste of time.

MagentoGuys provides all types of support and full cycle setup services to create lucrative Magento stores for any business, like

Ecommerce website for chemists

Ecommerce website for bakery shop

Ecommerce website for restaurant

Ecommerce website for fashion retailer

etc.

MagentoGuys is a reputed Magento 2 development company, delivering innovative Magento solutions & support to clients worldwide.