In the modern-day, the general public is transitioning further into a preference for buying digitally. This transition has occurred at a faster rate than any predictions. But what does this mean in terms of you and us? As an eCommerce and Magento focused agency we pride ourselves on being ahead of the competitors and being prepared for the future, so why take a chance on a company that is trying to adapt to a changing market when you can come those who have been doing it for years. Don’t believe us? Have a look at some of our work and see for yourself.

The future of eCommerce is first and foremost: personalised. There is no longer a generalised idea that can be used on every client. As a Magento eCommerce agency, we focus on ensuring that we meet the expectations of our clients. This is done by identifying the needs of the client and making sure the content and service we provide to them is personalised and suits what they are looking for. Furthermore, as mentioned in the Adobe future of eCommerce guide, the modern customer expectation is that online retailers are to be at the forefront of digital innovation. This is outlined with examples such as having a fast mobile experience, the ability to purchase using only your voice, visual search, discovery tools and a highly visualised experience through the buying journey. All of these are pushing merchants to move further out of their comfort zones and experiment with new and emerging technology. These are areas in which we at AdLab have been exploring and pushing our training to give our clients every opportunity to stay at the forefront of digital innovation whilst continually ensuring that AdLab as a company are up to date and fully trained on what we offer from website design to eCommerce and Magento.

Adobe also predicts that the future will see an acceleration in Business to Business (B2B) firms moving to a digital-first selling motion. Essentially highlights that the modern B2B buyers are no longer interested in dealing with sales representatives and paper catalogues and are instead looking for a much simpler solution. Essentially a Business to Consumer (B2C) model similar to Amazon and expects the firms they are buying from to embrace this change and adapt to what their consumers are requesting. This is essentially what AdLab as a Magento eCommerce agency does, as an Adobe Bronze Solution Partner, identifying what a consumer wants and expects from a website along with what the company itself needs from their own website and working with our team to create, bug test and monitor the site the ensure our clients are receiving full value from us. If you want to know more about what we can do for you, then have a look at our services on our website for more information.

Ethical Consumerism and Values-Driven Brands

One aspect of the future of eCommerce is where brands are finally being held responsible in relation to social and environmental issues, and the brands that are listening and responding to this are benefitting. Forbes highlights that in a study of 1000 Americans, 87% have a more positive image of a company if they support social or environmental issues in addition to 88% stating they would be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues and finally 92% would be more likely to trust a company that supports social or environmental issues. With the move further towards eCommerce and companies focusing on digital sales, many brands are also adapting their products, supply chains and practices to improve CSR (corporate social responsibility).

Due to this, values-driven brands are having to change their content models to ensure the values that resonate with their consumers are consistently being communicated across the entire user journey from discovery, to purchase, to ownership. Adobes guide outlines that this utilises everything from UX, CX, product content, design and more. Adobe gives examples of ‘Kanuk’ and ‘Prana’ as brands that can be looked up to as they are leveraging eCommerce to communicate their environmental accountability. 

Some smaller actions can also be taken to improve sustainability and improve customer experience such as how Narvar suggests implementing slower or consolidated shipping to a merchant’s checkout experience. This allows users to receive multiple items in a singular package rather than separately or for a slower delivery time both to act as a way to reduce the company and the consumers’ carbon footprint by minimising paper on delivery and returns as well as allowing the company to present their ideals without requiring their consumers to opt-in they are both preventing alienation of those who may not fully agree with the ideas while also allowing those who agree to become more loyal to the brand due to their stance. Narvar also suggests tailoring the delivery notifications to cater to their consumers’ positioning to coincide with their views.

Another area that is gaining traction in eCommerce is the idea of recommerce. Where products that are preowned are revitalised or simply sold as they are to reduce waste and improve the general sustainability of products. A great example of this would be one of our partner companies Hamilton Billiards. They have managed to weave recommerce into their business becoming one of their attractions (that being the restoration of billiards tables). Many luxury fashion brands are also taking a rental approach to highlight their sustainability by working against fast fashion and allowing consumers to rent a product for an event and return it rather than purchase an item that would be thrown away soon after. 

Neilson outlines the five current sustainability strategies for retailers and manufacturers as:

1. Reduce and/or reformulate packaging and ingredients.
2. Revamp the supply chain and/or supplies.
3. Diversify the product and/or vendor portfolio.
4. Update and/or change existing business models.
5. Integrate sustainability into consumer touchpoints and marketing.

Omnichannel Experiences

Another area that is being recommended to focus on is seamless omnichannel experiences. This is the idea of individual customer touchpoints, over a variety of channels that seamlessly connect, allowing customers to pick up where they left off on one channel and continue the experience on another. According to PWC 86% of buyers would be willing to pay more for a great customer experience. As a result of this, merchants should attempt to:

• Compete on customer experience ahead of price.
• Pay attention to omnichannel experiences and the buyer journey.
• Gain a handle on social shopping and influencer marketing.

Personalisation

Another area that is gaining traction for the future of eCommerce is personalisation. This relies on the understanding of where customers are within their journey. The traditional approach is to segment audiences into five or six groups and created different experiences for each group. This form of personalisation, however, will not last the test of time and if merchants want to maintain relevance, they will have to develop a more personalised experience for everyone, and the way in which Adobe claims this will be done is through artificial intelligence.

Adobe outlines Netflix as their key example of personalisation. Already using artificial intelligence to recommend similar films to what the user has already watched. However, they take the personalisation a step further as they track which films have been watched and will showcase a thumbnail for another movie showcasing the genre the consumer generally watches.

Another example would be on our AdLab website. A feature as small as tracking the consumers’ specific search phrase and the location mentioned, then when they enter the website, the page will highlight the area which they mentioned to showcase that we cover their area. You can see an example of this through the areas covered page where you can see examples of the page reacting to the location you choose.

Headless eCommerce

Monolithic systems all built under one large system has been widely criticised for their lack of flexibility and need for a developer to create changes. However headless eCommerce and microservice creates several smaller systems which highlight different uses and capabilities specific to their needs. However, many systems are still monolithic causing delays in changes which could boost sales almost immediately by reacting to trends. 

While monolithic systems have issues, they are continuously utilised due to their simplicity compared to microservice. The ease of having one thing in one location simplifies the monitoring, testing and logging and lack of cross-cutting concerns. Many website design agencies would rather stick to the monolithic systems due to ease and lack of need for follow up rather than identify the specific needs of the customer and build according to that. However, AdLab believes that if you need specific features then you should have them rather than avoid them due to ease. 

As a company, AdLab continuously pushes for our clients to succeed with us and to show them the help we can provide and continuously fulfil and rise above a company’s goals. Headless eCommerce is the main feature of this, whereby allowing the marketing and creatives have the freedom and mobility within their website, they are able to experiment and test and get the best value possible.

Mobile PWA

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) were expected to proliferate in 2020 and become the standard for mobile commerce. As a result, the price will reduce making it much more accessible for merchants. Mobile PWAs are essentially both a website and a mobile app and nullify the need to develop a native app. PWAs reinvents the mobile customer experience as they blur the line between store, web, and mobile experiences better than any existing technology as all exist through the same singular development.

There are several benefits to utilising PWAs in eCommerce as outlined by Applied Information Sciences:

• Fast deployment: Avoids submission to the app stores for review and approval.
• Quicker updates are published immediately because it is served on the web and so no need to wait for the user to download them to their device.
• More discoverable: Users can find and link to it via search engines.
• Secure: They use the browser security model, so providing the security of operating within the web browser context.
• Connectivity independent: PWAs can function on very low bandwidth or no connection at all.
• Installable: Like a mobile app, this is opened from an icon on the home screen.
• Notifications: Can send push notifications to the device like a native app.
• Hardware access: Can use the mobile device camera, microphone, etc.

Furthermore, PWAs are continuously becoming more popular and over the last two years have lowered in price and becoming more integrated alongside website design, allowing to two to be built alongside each other and be a cheaper alternative than outsourcing the creation of a native app.

Micro Animations

While Micro Animations such as gifs have been around for almost as long as the internet itself, it isn’t until now that they have begun to transition from entertainment to eCommerce. The use of gifs in eCommerce is to emphasise the brand, improve user experience and boost conversions. Within the Adobe guide, they highlight some tips for using animation in the eCommerce buyer journey such as:

• Make the icon design consistent with the brand.
• Add the icons to your corporate style guide so you can leverage them wherever appropriate.
• Make sure the icon code base is fast-loading and compatible with your page code
• When animating your purchase path, make sure that each step is displayed consistently and visually rewards users for completing the process
• Don’t use animations for the sake of using animations. Strategically plan out the customer paths and identify the best positions to insert icons to accomplish business goals.
• Use A/B testing to ensure you’re maximizing conversions.

Visual and Voice Search

The modern-day consumer, aged 18-34 has shown increased interest in visual search and image recognition tools, especially to discover new brands. RocketSpace predicted that by 2021, brands that supported visual and voice search would increase their revenue by 30%, while when the article was written in 2019 only 8% of retailers had a built-in image search. However, this idea has both been greatly improved with time, while also seemingly being stuck in the mud. The big names are still able to utilise visual search to their advantage and eCommerce sites such as Amazon have even built upon the idea of utilising augmented reality to showcase the item in real-time within your room, while the smaller companies are still struggling to showcase the very basics of it. Visual search is a huge step towards the future of eCommerce and the simplification of the user journey, but it seems to be kept for the big names exclusively.

It is still argued that we are in the early days of voice, but despite this almost three-quarters of people would prefer to use voice as an input to search. This is working alongside the introduction of household “personal assistants” such as Alexa. With Voicebot Ai found that over 85% of voice purchases were for $100 or less highlighting that adding your business to these devices can be beneficial if your products fit within the range of those generally purchased. Adobe recommends when looking to implement voice search, merchants should keep in mind:

• Consumers want to search with their own words, not the keywords a merchant has specified.
• Customers expect to see voice input as an option for searching on mobile.

Next Gen B2B eCommerce

Adobe recommended going into 2020 that B2B brands prepared themselves for digital transformations and should do so by asking the following:

• What do we want to accomplish? 
• What are our top challenges? 
• What are the technology requirements for our digital transformation? 
• How do we collect the right data?

As B2B eCommerce has shifted further towards a customer-centric focus rather than product-centric, this change is allowing B2B organisations to explore new opportunities and channels to improve customer experience and expand their target audience. This is beneficial to them as according to Forrester 43% of buyers prefer to buy products directly from the brand rather than the retailer. These changes in B2B eCommerce are one of many website redesign features that we at AdLab can offer to improve both customer experience and increase sales.

Marketplaces

Platform revolution can be identified in its clearest through the explosion of online marketplaces. Every year, the top 100 online marketplaces sell over $1.8 trillion. In addition to Alibaba making up for 80% of China’s eCommerce and in the U.S Amazon’s third-party marketplace makes up for 58% of its sales. Adobe even mentions that the companies that are taking the lead in this new ecosystem-driven economy are seeing nearly double the revenue growth of those who are playing it safe. While many brands may be put off by the idea of losing a percentage of their sales but unless a merchant is willing to adapt to appeal to a new audience utilising B2B eCommerce which may be quite expensive, their best option is to join marketplaces and utilise their wide reach.

Conclusion

In conclusion due to the rapid growth of eCommerce from multiple factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a growing demand for better agencies it is more important now than ever before to find an agency that you trust and who truly knows what they are doing when it comes to eCommerce and here at AdLab that is exactly what we do.