Introduction to the topic
E-commerce is important for retailers and businesses of all sizes. When studying the landscape of e-commerce, agencies must be experts, one step ahead of the curve, to give their clients an edge. They should bring ideas to their customers instead of taking orders when their customer is interested in e-commerce.
What are the numbers? Amazon currently accounts for 44% of all online retail sales. In 2017, American companies saw 9% of their sales come from online platforms. It’s not huge at this point, but it is increasing.
Key eCommerce Players
WooCommerce, Magento and Shopify are the main platforms used for e-commerce. WooCommerce is a very popular e-commerce platform. It is designed to integrate easily with WordPress and has a wide selection of payment gateways, including PayPal. For most businesses, WooCommerce has a variety of growth options and custom templates.
If the price of building and maintaining a site on WordPress is too high, there is always Shopify. Although this platform doesn’t give as many plugin choices as WooCommerce, sometimes simple might be better. Over 600,000 online store owners think so.
Magento is designed for more complex e-commerce sites, which is why many large global brands use this large open source framework to power their business. The Magento configuration gives companies the flexibility to grow and expand beyond their initial limits. The options are endless for companies using Magento.
eCommerce Trends
CRMs
Customer relationship management, or CRM, are sites or programs that keep track of customer data for retailers. Businesses can benefit significantly by monitoring on-site chats, Facebook Messenger, SMS, email or by staying informed of order statuses and customer groups, such as loyalty programs and referral programs. All of these can help a company better understand how to market its products to customers.
Email Marketing
When used to interact with an interested audience, email marketing is a powerful tool for e-commerce. There are many platforms that provide email marketing tools, as well as the benefit of monitoring the number of openings and clicks. MailChimp, Benchmark or Campaigner are only the first three options. Two useful ways to get the most out of email marketing are to send abandoned cart emails. With these reminder emails, you could potentially recover 15-20% of sales that would otherwise be lost. Also consider receiving welcome or engagement emails to your customers, offering them special offers or discounts at life events such as birthdays or holidays.
Mobile Readiness
Is your business ready for the future? Statistics show that in 2015, 60% of online shoppers used a mobile device and ultimately made 15% of their purchases online. It was in 2015.
Now, since the mobile experience has become more optimized, there is a lot of pressure to continue improving the UX on mobile devices. Increased use of digital wallets, easy-to-use mobile search and readily available videos will further increase the use of purchases over the phone rather than in person.
The Future of eCommerce
With each generation, technology is becoming more and more common and comfortable. Generation Y already accounts for around 54% of online shopping. Large companies invest in e-commerce and this is also worthwhile for SMEs.
Many other tools used in electronic commerce are no longer so distant and futuristic. Many companies already use AI / AR, image search and voice search on their sites. Machine learning and AI are also used, but will continue to play a more important role as technology improves. Read a more in-depth article on these tools here.
Just because new technology is coming, it doesn’t mean that email will disappear. In fact, email marketing could become more popular. According to trends, spending on email marketing in the United States will drop from US $ 2.07 billion in 2014 to US $ 3.07 billion in 2019.
Leave A Comment