10 Best E-commerce Trends To Look For In 2022
E-commerce has seen a drastic change in the last few years and continues to evolve. With the Covid-19 pandemic making e-commerce more relevant and accessible than ever, the industry is adapting faster than in the previous two decades.
The rapid evolution of the e-commerce market makes it necessary for businesses to keep up with upcoming online shopping trends to remain relevant and sustain their customer base. They should be familiar with these emerging trends in e-commerce and follow them so that they can stay up-to-date on the latest industry standards.
Various factors like a change in the buyer shopping behavior, rise in competition, optimization of digital content, a boost in the advertising, marketing, and promotion rates need to be deeply considered by e-commerce brands today.
Hence, brands will have to analyze and adopt the latest e-commerce industry trends to keep up with the game. The emerging trends in e-commerce majorly focus on providing a highly personalized experience to its customers.
The more personalized the consumers’ shopping journey, the better can businesses build connections with them to earn their trust and loyalty. This article covers 10 e-commerce trends that can help companies outshine the current ecosystem.
#1 Your sales staff are a highly essential asset
Even though online shopping has been around for quite some time, it’s yet to provide a proper alternative to the personal touch that brick-and-mortar stores offer. Even though people are getting more comfortable with virtual shopping, the need for a live shopping assistant remains.
When you go to a brick-and-mortar store, assistant shoppers help you find what you need, make valuable suggestions and save you a lot of time.
Similarly, a live shopping assistant can save your customers a great deal of time and improve their overall experience when shopping online. Incorporating a professionally trained team to provide information and guide the browsing customers can boost conversions by up to 5 times by adding virtual shopping to the online sales strategy.
Instead of hiring new employees for the task, you should handpick people from your existing sales team. Provide them with proper training for live shopping assistance to customers.
Customers like it when the employees seem real and provide them with immediate responses and feel confident buying from such a brand. And no one would know a business and its products better than the existing sales staff.
#2 Leverage video in your marketing strategy
One of the most effective online shopping trends for 2022 is incorporating video as a part of the marketing strategy. During the pandemic, the internet saw a huge boom, especially social media, including video platforms like YouTube.
Also, people were mainly shopping online, which slowly became a habit that continues to date. Now brick and mortar stores are finding it hard to match the safety and comfort of shopping from home.
However, online shopping is still struggling to match the personalized nature of physical shopping.
Videos are a great way to bridge that gap. Through videos, people get a chance to see the product they want to buy in real-time.
Product explainer videos are a great way to show your audience how the product works. You can also put up review videos to show how other customers liked the product. In short, video content is a great way to convert your online leads.
#3 Using artificial intelligence and machine learning
Making it to the list of online shopping trends 2022 is AI or artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI helps in providing the customers with a very personalized shopping experience. Its most significant advantage is that it allows eCommerce stores to recommend relevant products to their customers using predictive search.
Earlier, online shopping platforms used manual recommendations. Which were not only prone to mistakes but also highly generic. With the help of AI, online stores can consider a lot of factors and preferences before deciding what to recommend to the customers.
For instance, the AI uses various insights like the customer’s search history, their gender, their purchasing history, demography, and more, to recommend relevant products and services. Businesses can use various predictive analytics tools like behavioral analytics, image recognition, inventory management, and automation for personalizing the customers’ buying experience.
#4 Live commerce or live stream shopping
Like on home shopping channels, where a host sells a piece of jewelry or electronics on live TV, eCommerce brands in Asia are experimenting with live commerce or live stream shopping. It is possible that by 2026, live commerce will be responsible for at least 20% of the total eCommerce sales.
The trend is gaining popularity, and is being used by various eCommerce brands as a way to engage with their audience. Live commerce streams are often hosted by influencers who interact and engage with the audience on social media while showcasing commercial products.
While in some cases they offer a link where people can buy the product, many allow the visitors to buy those products directly on the live stream.
Besides social media platforms, live commerce streams can be hosted on the brand’s website or mobile app. Here are a few recent successful live commerce campaigns:
Walmart and TikTok
Retail giant, Walmart, collaborated with short-video platform, TikTok, for a live-streamed shopping experience. Where visitors were allowed to add products they liked to their carts with a simple click. The event got 7x the expected viewership, and Walmart gained 25% more followers.
Amazon Live
Amazon had recently launched a standalone live commerce platform called “Amazon Live,” where curators and influencers could post live product-oriented video content and special offers. During these live streams, the audience can ask questions related to the product on chat, which helps increase engagement and boost sales.
Facebook and Live Shopping Fridays
Even Facebook is experimenting with live-streamed shopping videos where the audience can watch and place orders in real-time. The videos include demos of products from various brands, and the best part is the viewers can ask their questions and place their orders without having to leave Facebook.
#5 On-Device Authentication
There was a time when we had one email id and we had a hard time remembering its password. Then came social media accounts, online banking and now we have so many different accounts that it is almost impossible to remember the password for all of them.
Every eCommerce store websites require you to have a password for log in. The easiest way is to save the password to the web browser, but that only makes you vulnerable to hackers and cybercriminals.
As a solution, what has evolved as one of the eCommerce trends in 2022 is on-device authentication. Consumers prefer on-device authentication like a fingerprint scan or facial recognition and feel safe while shopping from eCommerce brand apps with such features.
#6 Mobile Commerce or mCommerce
Since the advancement in smartphone technology and the growing accessibility of mobile internet, we have transitioned from browsing on PCs and laptops to mobile phones.
People prefer using a mobile phone over laptops because they can do a million different things, all on a small box that fits in their palm.
Now, if eCommerce brands do not optimize their site for mobile, they risk losing the better part of their customers. You might have an excellent website for PCs or laptops, but you risk losing out on a significant chunk of business unless it is optimized for mobile screens.
So one thing you need to do is make sure that your eCommerce store looks great on every medium.
It’s convenient for customers to buy and pay for your products on their mobile phones. Making it crucial for you to adopt the most important online shopping trend of 2022. And that is mobile commerce or mCommerce.
Projections state that mobile commerce sales will double by 2025, and eCommerce brands need to cash in on the opportunity and work on providing their customers with the best mobile shopping experience. You can use various features like SMS marketing, push notifications, quality mobile content, a website optimized for mobile, and a mobile eCommerce app to get the best out of mCommerce.
#7 Sustainability
Even though this might not seem like one of the emerging trends in eCommerce, believe us, it is. During the global lockdowns, carbon dioxide emissions and overall pollution were reduced to a great extent.
People around the world realized and became aware of how their daily activities are posing a threat to the environment. And are actively trying now to become eco-conscious.
Consumers these days are picking brands based on their sustainability models.
Let’s take a simple example for this. Brand A sells a product for $100, and Brand B sells a similar product at a similar price-point. Brand B also donates to an NGO dedicated to climate change.
Most customers would likely go for brand B because sustainability is not only about eco-friendly products but businesses accepting their role in preserving the environment. And this can only be done by adopting various sustainable business practices.
Besides promoting sustainability by supporting NGOs and activist groups, a great way to be an eco-friendly business is to consider sustainable alternatives for every step within the business. If you deliver your product to a customer in green packaging, use e-vehicles for transport, or simply pledge to plant trees for every product sold, they might recommend your brand to others and continue to buy from you.
What’s better than expanding your market share while giving back to the planet?
Make sure to promote and communicate your sustainability practices to your customers. Not only will it help in building trust, but also in growing the business.
#8 Social commerce
Let’s say you are browsing through a brand page on Instagram and you like a product. Now if you have to go to the website of the same company, look for the same product, and then make the purchase, how tedious would it be?
Even if there is a link that you can click on and buy the product from the company’s website, it won’t be the best way to make the purchase. The ideal option would be to buy the product then and there on Instagram when you like it, without going through the hassle of landing on another website.
That right there is social commerce and is one of the most popular online shopping trends of 2022. It’s not just about the pain of going to another website, but customers also feel more secure buying the product where they first encountered it than clicking on an unknown link.
In other words, social commerce is buying and selling products or services directly through social media platforms.
Social commerce enables social media to become a direct sales channel. It also help consumers seek advice, opinions, or information for products right before purchase.
Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest already have tools for buying and selling products, and very recently, TikTok launched a TikTok shopping feature.
Due to the immense popularity of this trend, more and more brands are leveraging social commerce to influence their customers’ purchasing decisions.
As per Bloomberg, social commerce might become a $1.2 trillion industry by 2025, and if you want to jump into it, now is the time. Increase your social media budgets, plan a social strategy surrounding social commerce, work on building your social media audience, and create quality content for them to engage and convert.
#9 Personalization is key
Personalization is more than just greeting visitors with a “hey” when they come to your website. The key to winning at eCommerce is personalization because how else will you convince your customers that they are exactly where they are meant to be.
Brands need to study their customers, learn about their preferences, and get to know them better. The more you understand and relate to your customers, the more likely you are to offer them what they need.
Personalization is one of the most important eCommerce trends of 2022 because when a customer sees a personalized approach, they feel valued by that brand. And there is nothing more essential than to make a customer feel valued in the world of eCommerce.
A customer who feels valued will go beyond prices, marketing, promotions, and all other factors to stick to their preferred brand. Personalization plays an influential role in retaining customers. Moreover, it helps boost sales, reduce cart abandonment, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
eCommerce brands are investing in technology that can help them send personalized pop-ups, relevant promotional offers, and follow-up emails to their customers.
Besides machine learning, online tracking technologies and smart website features can also help you provide your customers with a highly personalized experience. And if that is not enough, you can also consider integrating user-generated content or UGC to incorporate personalization into your strategy.
User-generated content is helpful when personalizing customer experience because it comes directly from your customers and can help you understand them and their preferences better. When you start studying the content your target audience is posting; you can create tailormade content, marketing materials, products, services, and more.
#10 B2B eCommerce
Like B2B, when a business sells goods or services to another business online, it is called B2B eCommerce. B2B eCommerce helps minimize the time and effort spent on manually placing or receiving orders.
Complicated phone orders and paper catalogs are being replaced by completely digitized self-serving shopping experiences, highly streamlined back-end processes, and excellent customer service. However, to stay ahead of the competition, B2B businesses need to invest in creating online catalogs, providing quick and efficient fulfillment, and online shopping experiences similar to B2C.
As per Amazon’s B2B eCommerce report, a major portion of industries like healthcare, government, education, and so on, are opting for B2B eCommerce. Since B2B is a huge business segment, the eCommerce aspect will bring about a lot of automation in every kind of process.
These processes would include automated accounts receivable, accounts payable, fulfillment, and reordering. B2B eCommerce is expected to grow by more than 70% and cross $20 trillion by 2027.
Final Thoughts
Even though brick-and-mortar retail has been a preferred business model for years, eCommerce is quickly catching on. A good understanding of the latest eCommerce industry trends will help you identify which ones work best for your business model and brand.
Look at the emerging trends in eCommerce that your competitors are adopting, and incorporate them into your business. Customers will be expecting a more convenient, seamless, and memorable online shopping experience than ever before in 2022, and you don’t want to be left behind.
Here are the 10 best eCommerce trends for 2022 that you can use to up your eCommerce game. And if you are just starting out, try our store name generator to find a catchy, relevant and memorable name for your new eCommerce venture. Good luck!
