The days of “closing sales” are numbered. Nowadays customers do not only want to buy, they want to have a purchase experience. That’s whay we speack about e-Commerce trends in 2019.
It’s common sense that the Internet has changed the way we consume products and services. With each passing year, more and more people have access to the web and the online sales are expected to continue to increase.
E-commerce figures in Portugal are growing significantly, and the digital world has increasingly more influence on the purchase decisions in the physical stores. To keep it interesting, it’s necessary to make a difference and offer the user the best possible experience.
Our partner E-goi suggests 5 e-Commerce trends that will boost sales and reinvent the way consumers interact with the brand and we’re going to share them with you.
1. Virtual reality: with ever more sophisticated smartphones, it is possible to use the screens to make simulations. These simulations are aimed at knowing if a certain product goes well in your kitchen, if a piece of furniture fits that space in the living-room at home, etc.
2. The digital world influences the physical world: ROPO technologies “Research Online Purchase Offline Ratio” are increasingly accessible to people and retail. These tools allow you to more accurately measure how your ads, SMS campaigns and email marketing and visits to virtual stores influence a purchase decision at the physical stores.
3. Artificial intelligence:its insertion into the e-commerce universe has as main purpose to offer more efficiency and speed in the consumer service, where any doubts and problems will be resolved by machines, thus reducing the waiting time. These technologies are changing the processes related to customer service, costumer acquisition and logistics.
4. Chatbots: this is the main feature of Artificial Intelligence as it simulates the customer service provided by humans. Its main advantages are 24/7 service on any channel (Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, at the store’s website, SMS, among many others), regardless of where the customer is, it is possible for the company to be present.
5. Voice command: voice searches are more and more present in the consumers’ daily life. For e-commerce this is the major challenge: to provide data and product detailed information based on the voice searches. The popularisation of virtual assistants, such as Apple’ Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is also a great challenge as they lead to a single answer and not to various results.
These trends bring several challenges to the market and maybe the biggest one is the need to keep up with new technologies. It is essential that virtual stores are integrated into this universe, which will increasingly dictate the rules and online and offline consumers’ behaviours.
