“E-commerce merchants will have to embrace new technologies and keep with changes to survive and stay ahead.”
The rapid pace of eCommerce evolution shows no signs of slowing down
What will eCommerce look like in 2021?
Are you asking yourself the same question?
Throughout this blog, we will cover the top eCommerce trends we recommend merchants and business owners embrace in 2021 to meet the ever-advancing expectations of online buyers.
Before we dive into 2021 eCommerce trends, let’s discuss the influential agents responsible for the success of eCommerce sales and revenue in 2021 — The Customers.
eCommerce Future is Customer-Driven
Like the emphasis on product quality and its price, eCommerce has gradually become more about the experience customers have with your brand.
Today, eCommerce merchants with industry experts are trying to create experiences that prioritize what customers value the most – convenience, sustainability, trust, and efficiency.
The digital buying experience of customers is becoming quicker than previously forecasted. To meet their expectations, you must align your business with relevancy and personalization. Not just these, digital buyers also expect online merchants to be at the forefront of digital innovation.
Numerous Magento eCommerce experts suggest that if there’s no personalization, the chances of conversion are low. To operate a customer-driven eCommerce business, you must readily serve potential customers with seamless omnichannel experiences to practice ethical consumerism and establish yourself as a value-driven brand.
Visual search, voice search, advanced discovery tools, blazing-fast mobile experiences, and a highly visualized end to end buying journey are just a few anticipated expectations of modern-day online customers.
To suffice these ever-advancing expectations from eCommerce stores, the following eCommerce trends can be your blueprint for eCommerce success in 2021 or beyond:
1. Voice as an eCommerce Channel
Juniper forecasts that the voice shopping market will skyrocket to $80 billion by 2023 – driving the adoption of smart speakers.
The global adoption of voice technology and trends means that many changes will come in the way consumers interact and engage online. To match up to consumer demands, marketers will have to fine-tune SEO strategies to optimize stores, products, and services for voice search.
Benefits of embracing voice search:
- Provides optimized results
- Hands-Free search option
- Serves with prompt answers
- Renders multi-tasking Abilities
2. Seamless Omnichannel Experience
If you’re selling your products through marketplaces such as Alibaba, Amazon, or through resellers, stores, distributors, as well as through your business websites and mobile apps, you’re an omnichannel business.
Millennials and GenZ aspire to buy whenever they want (even at odd hours), on any device (smartphones, tablets, or digital assistants), through any channel, and expect various delivery options. Such needs are driving the pace of technological innovation in commerce, both offline and online.
Be it B2C, B2B, or Hybrid businesses, when combined with a modern omnichannel strategy, you’ll attract more buyers to your store. Several studies show that modern buyers are looking for and demanding omnichannel experiences
Benefits of embracing Omnichannel:
- Unified Shopping experience
- Buying made more consistent & convenient
- Flexible order fulfillment
- Intelligent order management
- Broaden consumer reach
3. Adoption of Headless Commerce
With IoT becoming the epicenter of innovation in the technology niche, eCommerce is also set to embrace the headless commerce architecture.
Built for the IoT age, headless commerce offers a clean separation of a website’s front end from back end, enabling both to operate independently. You can achieve improved flexibility, agility, and performance of the store by using commerce APIs to deliver services between the two halves.
With headless commerce in the picture, Magento eCommerce expert developers can commerce-enable any application or IoT device and integrate with external CMSs seamlessly.
Benefits of embracing Headless:
- Flexible development options
- Robust Personalization
- Scale your site faster
- Empowering marketing team
Wrapping it up
If you ask us about the future of eCommerce, it’s going to be about how you can make commerce simpler for the customer. With consumers embracing advanced tech gadgets and gears, they’re in a constant search to get instant answers to questions, solutions to their problems, purchase the product without friction, and to receive the desired product in the least possible time.
Hopefully, the trends discussed above will accomplish all these expectations of customers, because, with voice search, drones, and omnichannel platforms like Magento, a tech-enabled future is very near.
