Despite the global economic instability caused by the pandemic, eCommerce continues to expand, with e-sales accounting for 14.1% of the worldwide retail sales. This humongous sales figure is expected to reach 21.8% by 2024. This is a precursor to growing heavy competition in the eCommerce industry. Therefore, the evolution of eCommerce into a customer-centric solution is the ideal approach to take in the upcoming year.

Making Customers Happier with Projected eCommerce Trends For 2022

The Global Consumer Survey Report 2019 traces the impact of customer satisfaction on the profits made by the eCommerce industry. One-third of their research participants stated that they bought online products once a week or even more frequently. The survey also suggests focusing on ROX (return on experience) along with the ROI.

To make your customers happier, and boost your eCommerce retail, you can adopt the following projected trends that will rule the eCommerce industry in 2022.

Omnichannel Strategy

For enhancing your brand visibility, using multiple platforms is ideal. Today’s digital customers prefer to interact with brands on the channels of their choice and want the same experience across all channels. As brands diversify the ways for customer interactions, the conversion rate also goes up, leading to a successful business.

In this context, smart bots have completely redefined customer service functions. Using AI-enabled bots, retailers have been able to streamline their customer service processes, resolve problems faster, help their customers 24X7, and reduce customer service costs. These bots are highly accessible, immensely scalable, and allow agents to focus on more complex issues.

For instance, Madi, the bot by Madison Reed, helps users choose a hair color based on their personality. BlingChat makes it easy to plan weddings by finding and managing the various aspects of the event.

Association with eCommerce giants like Amazon and eBay gives a major lift to your business by assigning size and authority to it. A study reveals that 46.7% of eCommerce customers route from popular eCommerce stores like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. More than 50% of Amazon’s catalog is created by third-party vendors, thus allowing businesses to create their omnichannel presence. Social media presence is also mandatory as 37% of the users look for product images, reviews, and brand value online on social media platforms. Social media presence helps your brand reach out to the target audience and facilitates reverse search to increase your brand visibility.

Voice Shopping and Visual Search

Approximately 50% of people research products using voice search. With greater reception and better AI training, this number is going to go up. Voice shopping and search, therefore, become the hot topics of 2022. eTailers need to ensure that their eCommerce site is optimized for voice searching so that people can find simple details like contact numbers and business hours with their voice.

The global smart speaker market is expected to reach approximately USD 16 billion by 2025!  This shows that most consumers want to use voice assistants to help them out with shopping and daily life operations like calling or taking notes. Approximately 20% of customers have already made purchases through digital home assistants like Amazon Echo. What is more? 85% of people have said that they have gone ahead with their virtual assistant’s product recommendation rather than buying their preferred brand. It is no surprise that retail giants like Costco and Walgreens have partnered with Google to offer voice-activated orders through Google’s Home system.

Visual Search is another such trend that is picking up in online shopping. Instead of typing a search term, users are using their phone cameras as search engines. They can simply point to any object of their choice, take a picture, and get search results based on that. It is a powerful tech with a lot of potential. Pinterest Lens, Instagram Shopping, Google Lens are some of the popular visual search platforms.

Green Consumerism and Sustainability

Over the past few years, several companies have ridden the sustainability wagon to show that their brand cares. More businesses are now understanding the significance of green consumerism and sustainability and have started creating eco-friendly products and packaging.

43% of the respondents of a survey by Nosto expressed that they want brands to be more ardent believers in sustainability so that they can shop better. About 75% of them want to get away from plastic packaging completely. eCommerce companies can come up with their own sustainability plans like using eco-friendly packaging, cardboard boxes, recycled paper packaging, water-activated paper tape, etc. Some brands are also creating small customer delights by adding reusable freebies like metal straws with their shipments.

Headless eCommerce

Most businesses followed a structured one-stop solution where the backend stored different information and the frontend only showed what the customer required. This structure was mostly restrictive for creative designers. But now things are changing with the emerging trend of headless eCommerce.

With headless eCommerce, the backend is separate from the frontend, so the frontend can be independently updated without any change to the backend. This has opened up the possibilities of great creative innovation, and companies can scale up the customer experience significantly, too.

Faster Deliveries Through Diversified Supply Chain

Now that the world is healing from the wrath of a pandemic, the eCommerce industry needs to realign its delivery models. The 2021 Future Consumer Index shows that 37% of Americans prefer to shop online and pick up their deliveries from retail stores.

The eCommerce websites should adopt multilayered distribution models, software-assisted fulfillment, and hyper-optimized supply chains so that they are resilient in the face of any disruption.

Augmented And Virtual Reality

Most people understand augmented reality through the world of Pokémon Go mobile game. Now it is viable for companies to use augmented and virtual reality to boost their business.

The eCommerce industry can adopt AR features to create a unique shopping experience for their consumers, such that they have an illusion of trying an item like in a brick-and-mortar store. These features improve the conversion rate and reduce buyer uncertainties. There are virtual dressing rooms by clothing brands. Even IKEA has a virtual reality setup to measure a room and fit in a piece of furniture to see how it’ll look in real life. Remember that these are not just fancy eCommerce trends. Such features serve a great purpose in creating a futuristic shopping experience.

Social Media as a Storefront

Social media is no longer just a marketing space for businesses. It has developed into a shopping platform too, with Facebook and Instagram introducing easy shopping features.

Companies can advertise their products on their Facebook and Instagram pages along with featured images and prices. Consumers can directly shop from Facebook Marketplace and Instagram posts. This cuts out the step of creating an account on any eCommerce website, also resulting in better conversion with more positive comments and reviews.

Recently, Walmart used TikTok to sell their products directly to US consumers through live streams.

Final Thoughts

The eCommerce trends continue to grow with each passing day to create exciting experiences. It’s all about experimenting and monitoring what works best for your customers. Nowadays, businesses have a strong technical edge to attract their target audience and design customer-centric experiences to stand out.

As a digital technology partner, Sapours helps eCommerce companies to keep up with the changing trends, and develop modern solutions with SAP, Salesforce, and Magneto collaborations.