E-commerce has remained a hot trend for the past few years and is expected to grow its impact in the years ahead. The term means a lot to those who are concerned with online marketing and related fields. As the number of e-commerce stores is increasing, there is a race between the businesses to provide optimal satisfaction to users through a range of services. To satisfy the needs of the users in the best possible way, traders are leaving no stone unturned to offer the best services to the customers.
The approach of personalizing online shopping experience for the users is on its roll. For providing an unforgettable user experience, a number of techniques has evolved recently. With an ongoing explosion happening in the e-commerce space and digital marketing, business owners are getting extended opportunities to blend the positives of the online marketing trends with the points mentioned below. These are the hot e-commerce trends that are sustaining in 2015 and are expected to be prominent in the next year as well.
- Same day delivery/ Pickup stores: Same day delivery is one of the most important aspects of online retail marketing that is growing leaps and bounds. With this approach, it becomes easy for the customer to get the product in a jiffy. Amazon drone delivery offers a perfect example for the same. The company deploys drones to deliver a product to customers’home in 30 minutes after a package is ordered. In addition to this, pickup store concept is getting popularity among people who are not available at their residence during the delivery. The concept facilitates the delivery of a product at a certain store from where the parcel can further be collected by the receiver at his own convenience.
- Customize and visualize products: In this ever increasing customer dominated online marketing arena, consumers have the right to customize and visualize the products as per their preferences. The customization technique offers an opportunity to the customers to print any specific design on products such as tees, caps, visiting cards, photo calenders and more. Visualizing a product, on the other hand, is an extended chance for a viewer to get a 3d outlook of the showcased article. With this technique, a product over a website can be rotated in different angle to get the real view of the same.
- Loyalty programme or Cashback: Loyalty programs were created as structured marketing efforts to encourage loyal buying behavior. It offers points reward to the customer and potential advantage to the firm in the form of loyal customers. With every transaction, certain points are rewarded to customers by making purchase from verified stores. The points can be redeemed on the purchase of the next product. The cashback technique works by enabling customers to earn their cash back while visiting certain e-stores. The website that is offering the monitory benefit offers little share of the money that it gets from the retailer.
- Omnichannel marketing: The use of a variety of channels for shopping by a customer is the essence of omnichannel marketing. These wide range of channels include online and retail stores, mobile app store and certain other method of offering shopping way to the customer. The methods include buying, selling, returning, and pre sales and after sales methods as well. Technology plays a prominent role in omnichannel marketing to connect customers to certain products. Moreover, technology investment is also required to create inventory visibility, enable sales associates to understand customer preference, and to enable retail store to step forward as local fulfillment center with pick, pack and shipping abilities.
- The big data and retargeting: Big data is emerging as a term that has volumes of structure, semi-structures and unstructured data as well having the potential to be mined for further information. Big data generally consists of the petabyte and exabytes of data that has all the information regarding the pattern of data of an organization. The technique used to unleash the data is called big data analytics. On the other hand, retargeting goals to convert passive site visitors into active customers. Retargeting allows a website to connect to the customer to the website again who has left the site without any purchase. The technique involves using cookies that is put on the visitors’ hard disk to remember visitors’ last session.
- Mobile buying or mobile app: Mobile apps offer an easy way to the customer to make a purchase from online store. Apps help increase the reach of a website to millions of audiences that is not possible to accomplish through a brick and mortar shop. The technique saves the time of the user and helps him get connected to the most renowned sites to make the purchase. The trend of buying products and services through mobile apps is increasing never before owing to the ease this facility provides to the user. Moreover, mobiles are always there with a user and therefore the asset can be utilized anywhere anytime to make a purchase or just to visit an e-store.
- Big data analysis and user behavior analytics: Big data analysis is the new trend in the market that has made it easier to analyze the huge business data perfectly. The technique makes use of the patterns that were created with the accumulation of the business data. The technique helps in providing a solution to the acute business problems that can be solved easily with the solutions provided after analyzing the business data. Moreover, user behavior analytics is the technique of analyzing how web users behave. User behavior analytics narrow the scope if compared with business analytics. Behavior analytics makes use of user data that is captured while the user was busy in browsing any web application.
With the changing behavior of the user, the web trends have certainly changed a lot. Every innovation in the e-commerce trend is now offering a newer and better experience to the user to make his web session prominent. The aforementioned points are some of the hottest web trends that have registered their presence over the internet. These trends are providing richer user experience to the customers in different ways that also includes optimal online shopping experience. These web trends are not only advantageous for the customers only but also for the website owners to gain benefit further after offering the same to the customer.
Author Bio: Tom Hardy has a rich experience in e-commerce web development and works for Sparx IT Solutions. He actively contributes articles and blogs to let the readers know about the changing and sustaining web trends.