How to develop an online store – e-commerce prospects in 2022
Like every year, January was a time when we were inundated with reports, statistics, predictions and summaries. That’s because conclusions are provided by observations, and year-round prognosis can come from a synthesis of past years. The e-commerce sector is taking up more and more space and leaves quite a lot of room for prediction, and while most trends are not surprising, they are also quite unexpected.
According to jcommerce article.pl, we are able to see that two years ago there was a rapid acceleration and development of e-commerce industry. The most important seems to be the modernization of online sales channels among the leaders of traditional trade.
The McKinsey report proved that last year the online shopping industry grew up to 5 times faster than before the pandemic. The pace of development depended on the type of industry involved. There is a 39 percent increase in the number of online stores. (PrestaShop) with the growing importance of e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento.
Statista predicts that by 2023 e-commerce will have more than 20 percent. share in all sales that take place on the globe. The development of e-commerce also means the development of logistics, transport and storage, i.e. a dramatic increase in the importance of courier and shipping companies.
Marketplace – holistic puzzle
When talking about the trends and directions of an industry, one can look at it holistically as an industry in itself and its individual segments, which develop as the market evolves, or as a tool used to serve it. Undoubtedly, talking about e-commerce, we can come to the conclusion that this one is developing on different levels, dividing into categories. When we mean tools in e-commerce, we are of course talking about platforms used for sales or customer service. We can also distinguish a segmentation approach based on the social situation, beliefs and habits of customers. In fact, all of these issues overlap somewhere along the way and exist in deep connection.
Market trends – sectors and operations
With the growth of e-commerce, we can see an increasing separation of this market, which depends on its increasing scale. This means that more and more people are using it, which determines changes in its structure in terms of operation, organization and management.
Mobile Commerce
Shopping via cell phone is already observed in a growing number of customers. A study conducted by AdColony for Mobiem agency shows that 60 percent of. of the surveyed Polish users use a smartphone or tablet to do their shopping. JCommerce mentions studies that indicate that if an offer page does not load within three seconds, customers will abandon it. The lesson here is that sites that don’t adapt to mobile devices will only lose out to the competition.
Marketplace
Marketplace is a place where online stores operate in one place. It can be compared to a digital shopping mall, where the user has several stores in one place, where he can choose from a wide range of products. It’s a convenience for users who don’t have to spend time searching, and for brands it’s an opportunity to strengthen their position, a chance to buy, and it also helps build awareness if a particular brand is seen by users in other purchases they make. We can see the development of their marketplaces with Amazon, Facebook, Instagram or AliExpress or our own Allegro.
Cross-border sales
Development of marketplace platforms allows for a global view of existing markets. Product and service providers will now focus on: how to reduce the cost of international deliveries; how to break down cultural, language and legal-administrative barriers to reach the widest possible range of target customers.Omnichannel strategy
Multichannel is the key to enhancing the user experience. Being only in the form of a stationary store or only as a digital platform is very limiting in the shopping experience of the customer. Stores recognize that the customer journey is getting longer and includes more and more stages, so if retailers want to achieve high conversion rates, they should take care of a strategy in which the offer of their store has a chance to be presented on as many available channels as possible, whether offline or online.
Agile store management methodologies
Speaking of omnichannel strategy, it’s time for sales management strategy. JCommerce emphasizes that sales and its management is starting to resemble project work, for which SCRUM is used. Given the increasing dynamics and changing needs of the market with newer and newer obstacles, store owners are faced with the challenge of planning activities. Agile methods can be used to agilely plan sales and marketing activities with clever use of sprints, for example. quarterly.
Technology trends – tools
Social Selling
As we wrote in one of our articles, social media is a powerhouse in today’s technological world. This can be seen in China, where for the first time in history, more than 50 percent of. of retail sales in came from digital commerce this year, compared to 44.8 percent of. from last year. It is estimated that social commerce in the entire digital sector will grow to 36 percent. by the end of the year and will contribute $360 billion.
Headless commerce
The drive for responsiveness and increasingly efficient customer service are forcing a new approach to online store architecture. PWA and headless solutions seem to be the solution. They make websites to be fast, responsive and visually appealing. Making a website a Progressive Web Application increase its responsiveness, and separating backend from frontend is to increase flexibility and speed of the site. These efforts are to focus on delivering the best possible user experience.
Big Data
The implementation of business prediction algorithms has made companies more competitive. This has allowed them to predict trends, implement strategies and optimize budgets with limited risk. Big Data also allows for global analyses that can compare prices of competitors’ products and services, and are able to optimize the offer of the company that undertakes this analysis. This is important when the business scales to markets other than the home market. BI also predicts potential demand, allows them to manage resources. All of this impacts the consumer experience.
Blockchain
Introducing blockchain into e-commerce allows for the collection of payments with electronic currency, but also improves security. Blockchain technology records every transaction that takes place, and their history can be viewed by the entire network, The data obtained in this way cannot be deleted, changed or removed. This is important from the point of view of both customers and merchants who, by taking care of their security, can thus reduce fraud attempts, which in the last two years were experienced by almost half of the companies surveyed by PwC. Moreover, the use of this technology reduces the need to maintain systems for operational management, and funds sent via this route are not posted by banks, so it reduces the time required for delivery.
Megautomation
More and more companies are considering the process of hyper-automation, seeing how automation helps achieve profits at a relatively low cost. We will call this phenomenon the process of verifying and automating all possible business and IT processes. It is a method of scaling a business by using a combination of Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence or Robotic Process Automation systems. As you can see a tough piece of bread, but how profitable.
Low Code and No Code
Platforms with limited or no code usage can be very helpful in the future, especially when the IT market will be short of specialists, as we wrote here. These platforms allow the creation of simple stores without knowledge of the code, or its knowledge in a narrow range. Such a platform is e.g. Shopify.
The market will develop this trend, which can be seen when even Google or Microsoft themselves have taken up the topic.
Social trends – customer habits
Not only stores or strategies of running them are evolving. Trends related to human perception and economic habits are also becoming apparent. The situation we are facing and the development of awareness about ecology, human value or habits related to digitization are pushing e-commerce towards new paths.
Deferred payments
As the name suggests, deferred payments allow you to purchase goods and pay for them at a later date, usually between 30 and 45 days after delivery of the product. For sellers, the BNPL option means above all an increase in sales value and fewer abandoned shopping carts at the payment stage.
Re-commerce
Buying second-hand stuff online is becoming more and more common. This is not new, as we have been dealing with stores like OLX or Vinted for some time. Analysts, however, see ecology as a reason for consumers to care more about the products they use, which will increase interest in buying things from re-commerce.
E-grocery
Indications of The New Look direct our gaze towards well-known platforms Uber Eats, Wolt, Pyszne.pl or Glovo. The development of digital commerce, pandemic restrictions and changing consumer habits and behaviors have contributed to the development of online grocery shopping, which until recently was an abstraction. Today we have a wide selection of small and large food discounters, as well as the ability to choose the supplier, time and method of delivery. There has also been a dynamic development of services such as Click/Colect, that is, order online and pick up on the spot. As support for this thesis thenewlook.pl gives the example of InPost’s cooperation with hypermarkets in the fridge-machine project, which results in keeping the food delivered fresh.
The way a company does business or the medium in which it does business causes a number of changes in terms of the technology that develops in their wake. Courtesy of e-Piont, we can familiarize ourselves with some of such tech-trends.
Ecology and responsibility
This trend has been evident for quite some time, but is expected to become more entrenched. Stores are starting to label how much of their carbon footprint they use, what materials and origins the products are made from, where they were made and by whom. More and more customers support brands that are environmentally friendly. This trend is also evident among marketers, who are paying attention to the need to act inclusively, socially and environmentally..
Silver Commerce
Silver commerce refers to the silver generation, or seniors over the age of 65.that many professionals have forgotten. Their value is increasing in terms of the time they spend online, and because of the purchases they can make online. It is also relevant to the aging population. Online store owners should prepare more and more offers directed to this target group and not forget about User Experience. Departments responsible for user experience will also have to oblige senior groups in their calculations, which can be quite a challenge for the electronics sector.
Conversational marketing
More than 80 percent of. Customers want quick answers to their questions, and a large number of them are able to quickly move to a competitor when a particular company fails to provide an answer at a given time. Hence, there is a growing need to develop conversational marketing. The one in the form of chatbots, or other systems will be able to automate the process of immediately answering customer questions in real time solving their problems. This is also a strategy based on artificial intelligence, which could learn within the platform how to solve the questions asked by customers. One of such solutions is the WhatsApp for Business platform, whose capabilities were described by Hootsuite.
E-commerce market is the fastest growing sector of commerce we are currently dealing with. Companies, however, will have to find the golden mean between an automated process and the lack of contact with other people. The answer to this problem is to be Total Experience strategy, in which the main idea is to provide the best possible experience for all participants in a given process, both employees, customers and companies and observers.
