Ecommerce has been a mainstream way of purchasing goods for about a decade now. It was a rough beginning, and it took quite a while to get people used to buying items remotely, and the big hesitation was using your credit card online. People have gotten over most of their initial fears, and little by little ecommerce has been taking over the retail industry and taking a big bite out of other markets as well. Today’s generation of tech has learned the lessons of the past and is now finding ways of turning shoppers into buyers, by giving them no excuse to leave. Here are some of the new ideas that are changing our online experience.
- Omni Channel Support: If you go to one of the more complex websites these days, you are likely to notice a friendly little chat bot popping up and asking you a polite question. Usually you can choose to chat with the bot or move to another way of communicating with the site. For instance, you can co-browse with someone from the site, or screen share the site, or go face to face with a representative. Whatever you like, they got you covered
- Personalization: Nothing you do online is wasted any more. Through cookies and other methods of tracking, the AI systems of ecommerce can build a profile of you that will then use that information to provide you with a personalised shopping experience. This is based on your habits and the decisions of the AI interface. This is all part of the next wave of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO by Move ahead Media has SEO experts for every level of ecommerce application.
- Shifting to Mobile: Websites these days absolutely need to be shifting their primary focus to mobile. Being mobile friendly is a major parameter in search engine optimisation. For this reason, you are going to like browsing on a big screen less and less, but the statistics say that most people browse and shop from mobile devices. However, it is still good to design your site for multi-platform usage. Another feature of the shift to mobile is the shopping experience can be tailored to the specific location you happen to be in.
- Quicker Checkouts: Customers leaving items in the cart and quitting a search is something that ecommerce companies are working hard to avoid. More than 70% of shoppers make it all the way to the checkout, only to vanish before processing the purchase. There are many reasons to change your mind last minute, searching two sites at once and finding a better deal is one. But most people leave items in the cart because they are annoyed at some part of the payment process. Streamlining payments goes a long way to preventing this.
The next several years are going to see continual advancement in the ecommerce experience as new ideas get tested. The generation that grew up with ecommerce will soon be building the new systems. The best thing you can do is to make sure that your ecommerce site is ready to advance and remains flexible and scalable for the future.