With our feet firmly planted in 2015, there’s no use in looking back. This goes for your marketing and ecommerce strategies as well. The tactics you were using for growth and revenue in 2014 may not be working anymore. There is no doubt ecommerce is here to stay, and grow.
This is really great news for most online retailers. It means their businesses should continue to flourish, as more and more people take to purchasing online. The key here is should. Hopefully, online retailers can keep up with the ever-changing ecommerce landscape. To continue to succeed, it’s important to stay up-to-date with trends in your industry. We’ll take a look at some of the biggest predicted trends that happened to turn into 2015 realities.
24/7 Shipping and Delivery
One of the biggest questions online retailers must ask themselves is, “can we keep up with order demands?” A massive surge in online shoppers for the 2014 holiday season, starting even before Black Friday, left a lot of smaller companies struggling to meet the demands of shoppers. Shoppers tend to flock to online stores around the holidays because they believe they can get better deals online than in traditional stores. They don’t have to brave the massive holiday crowds or risk missing out on a small number of in-stock items.
This trend doesn’t just apply to the holidays. Online shoppers know they can shop at any time of the day, from anywhere. This flexibility brings a whole new customer to the ecommerce realm – these can be consumers that don’t have the time or accessibility to visit brick-and-mortar stores to find good deals. Your business must be able to meet their demands, or you’ll end up losing their business. A good system to gather and sort overnight or early orders must be seamless to ensure you’re able to fill those orders as soon as possible.
Online marketplaces like EBay and Amazon have set the standard for shipping trends. Not only can they keep up with huge numbers of purchases, but they tend to offer outstanding shipping deals. So often, consumers will choose a big online marketplace just because the shipping is free. Here, it’s clear your supply chain, stock, and fulfillment centers must be able to keep up. These massive retailers have even started to offer next-day shipping and Sunday deliveries. These shipping deals may not be totally realistic for smaller ecommerce businesses, but they must do their best to keep up with the trends.
Onmichannel Experience and Marketing
Shopping and marketing is no longer separate between channels. To keep up, businesses must be consistent and accessible across all channels, at all times. An online retailer’s brand messages and experiences must be unified. This means a sense of consistency must appear on all marketing and purchasing channels – social networks, online stores, and even brick-and-mortar stores.
This is especially important for online retailers that also have a brick-and-mortar stores. Of course, the goal is to sell as much, and be as visible, online as in-store. Think about big box stores like Target – their online shopping experience translates seamlessly to their physical stores with their app, deals, and in-store pickup options. Shoppers can even open their Target app for directions to product isles.
Granted, many online retailers don’t have a brick-and-mortar store – they depend on their online channel to provide all of their revenue. An omnichannel experience still applies. For example, Facebook gives retailers the option to add a button to their header that allows users to jump right to their store. Pinterest offers retailers rich pins that include crucial product info like price, dimensions, and more. Even more, Google search results include rich snippets with important info, and even options to shop right from Google in a product carousel.
It’s clear, every channel your business appears on needs to be optimized and maximized. An integrated marketing approach to social, content, and search is not optional – it’s totally necessary. Failing to create a logical, seamless experience online will lead to disjointed information and a loss in revenue.
Mobile Experience
We’ve said it before, in numerous blog posts, and we’ll say it again: your site needs to be mobile-friendly. More consumers spend time researching products and making a decision to purchase on mobile devices than ever before. One third (33%) of ecommerce purchases are happening on mobile devices. Even though desktop still commands the highest amount of online purchases, consumers interact with your site on mobile devices differently than they do on desktop computers.
Today, a good mobile experience is a large part of the buyer’s journey. Being totally visible, and having smooth navigations, on mobile allows your customers to move between the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buyer’s journey with ease. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, buyers will probably stall at the awareness or consideration stage of their journey, falling short of the decision stage.
If that’s not enough, Google has announced plans to take mobile-friendliness into consideration when determining rankings. Mobile-friendly labels can already be found on mobile SERPs (search engine results pages), but this algorithm update takes mobile-friendliness one step further. Beginning April 21st, Google will take the responsiveness and ease of use of your mobile site into account for rankings. In short, online retailers have a small window of time to create a good mobile-experience for shoppers. It’s not clear how this will affect desktop results, but it’s not clear that it won’t. No matter how good your SEO or marketing is, if you’re not mobile-friendly, you will lose valuable ground.
Individuality
All of the factors above contribute greatly to your site’s individuality. You should use your shipping offers, omnichannel approach, social presence, mobile-usability, and more to stand out. Everything you do online needs to send a unique brand message to consumers. This individuality allows you to rise above the noise of millions of ecommerce stores and gain the attention of those consumers.
As mentioned, big box stores and online marketplaces are here to stay for ecommerce. Adding a good level of individuality to your business practices can help direct customers to your site instead of theirs. This can be done by offering free, fast shipping as much as you can. Also, creating an environment of exceptional customer service, even 24-hour chat support, can help project an image of caring for your customers more than anyone else. It’s important to do what you can, and what makes you special, to prove that you’re the best.
In 2015, ecommerce is all about relationships, service, shipping, visibility, and individuality. If you make a solid commitment to your customers and your site, you’ll see gains in traffic and revenue. Most importantly, you need to stay on top of ecommerce trends. As a rapidly growing industry, ecommerce is susceptible to quick changes. Staying one step ahead of these shifts, and your competitors, will help lead to long-term growth and revenue.