9 eCommerce trends in 2023

No doubt that in the last few years competition in eCommerce has been fiercely increasing. A lot of businesses have taken the opportunity to grow their revenue by opening and continuously optimising their online shops.

In 2020 European eCommerce revenue was 425 billion U.S. dollars, and it does not stop there. It has been predicted that revenue will keep increasing, reaching 569 billion U.S. dollars in 2025. If your business has not taken the opportunity to open an online shop, then it is time to do so now.

In this blog, we will look into eCommerce trends that will be trending in 2023. Wondering how different they are from what was trending in eCommerce in 2022? Then this is a good time to refresh your memory. 

Upcoming eCommerce trends to stay competitive in 2023

There are many eCommerce trends to keep track of, but these are the top 9 that will be on everyone’s mind in 2023:

• Omnichannel presence
• Mobile commerce
• Social commerce
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Live shopping
• Payment methods
• Google Local Inventory Ads (LIA)
• Cookies
• Sustainability 

1. Omnichannel presence

Nowadays the practice of omnichannel shopping is common like never before. 56% of people who were shopping in-store used their smartphones to look up products or do product research while they were there. That means customers want to be able to do their research online, even if they are already in the store examining a product. 

A consistent customer experience must be created across all consumer touchpoints in omnichannel retail. These touchpoints may include phone calls, online visits, mobile purchases, and in-store interactions. Before making a purchase, a customer may come into contact with your brand through any or all of those channels, and their experience should be consistent.

Here are 4 strategies for how you can increase your omnichannel customer engagement:

• Personalize your customer shopping experience;
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly;
• Create “bridges” between physical stores and digital channels, providing features like a simple returns procedure and shipping to a variety of places;
• Offer social media customer support.

2. Mobile commerce

Technologies are moving forward, and that means mobile commerce is growing. Did you know that there are currently 7.26 billion mobile phone users worldwide, including both smart and feature phones? That means 91% of the world's population owns mobile phones. Further, predictions are that by 2026 mobile device users will increase to 7.516 billion.

For you as an eCommerce retailer, it means that more and more consumers could purchase your products or services through their mobile devices, and they prefer mobile commerce as their shopping channel.

Global mobile commerce sales are forecasted to reach almost €4.5 trillion by 2024, providing roughly 69.9% of all retail eCommerce sales. It is crucial to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile viewing given that more than half of all internet traffic is on mobile devices.

Improve the loading time of your website

Your website should load quickly for mobile users. Have you heard that pages  loading within 5 seconds have an average bounce rate of 38%? Optimizing your website loading time will help you not only to lower bounce rates but also improve the user experience.

Make your navigation menu simple

Screens on mobile devices are much smaller than those on desktops. Because of that, you’d better keep the navigation menu as compact and user-friendly as possible. Particularly popular is the usage of hamburger menus on mobile versions of websites.

Make your pop-ups mobile friendly

Pop-ups can be quite useful, but can also ruin the mobile experience. Screen space is extremely important on smaller devices, and even medium-sized pop-ups can be much more annoying than they are on your website's desktop edition. Google cracked down pop-ups and implemented a set of rules to follow.

3. Social commerce

Brands have previously used social media to increase brand recognition and generate leads. In the last few years, eCommerce businesses have started to boost sales by selling their products directly through social media channels. As a result, customers go directly to social media platforms on their mobile devices to find and purchase their favorite goods all in one place.

Each year social media coverage is increasing. Right now 59% of people around the world are using social media platforms, and you should not be surprised if, in the next few years, it will increase even more. It was predicted that social media platforms would generate €1 trillion by 2022 in global sales, and by 2026 that would increase €2.9 trillion.

The most popular social media platforms that offer social commerce are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and now also Twitter. If your eCommerce business does not yet use one of these social media platforms for social commerce, now is the right time to boost your sales. Don’t leave them out of your eCommerce strategy!

Focus on the right channels

You must determine which social media platforms work best for your products and services. Keep in mind that not all audiences are the same, therefore you must identify the ideal channels for connecting with your target audience.

Provide high-quality content

Give your audience information that is relevant and useful. A great strategy to interact with your audience and develop a devoted following is to share informative pieces that will inspire them to purchase your products.

Have seamless checkout

Reducing the number of steps customers must complete will help increase sales. Here is what you can do:

• Make account creation optional so that they can complete their purchase as guests;
• Provide your customers with a variety of payment alternatives so they have the freedom to choose the one that is most convenient for them;
• Verify the design eCommerce shop is modern for your clients to feel secure, your site's design can have a significant impact on how they perceive the security of transactions.

By integrating these features, you may reduce the number of steps involved in the purchasing process and give your consumers a simple checkout experience. Besides, people are more inclined to impulsive shopping if the purchase process is rather straightforward. 

Connect with Influencers

Find influencers in your eCommerce field and connect with them. Your brand's credibility will benefit from social media interactions with influencers. People will trust your company more after hearing about it from influencers, and you can reach a wider audience of their devoted followers.

Use user-generated content in your advance

User-generated content can provide the necessary social proof for your eCommerce business. Did you know that seeing user-generated content on social media increases a user's likelihood of making a purchase? User-generated content provides customers with a better understanding – a picture of how the product appears in actual use, whether it actually accomplishes what your eCommerce business claims, how it might appear on them, and so forth.

Connect with your consumers

Meet your customers where they already are, on social media platforms. Providing an absolutely fantastic customer experience can result in more devoted subscribers and an influx of new customers. Consumers that interact with brands on social media tend to spend more, which is a smart strategy to increase sales.

Use analytic tools

You can’t build your social content plan based just on a gut feeling. For your content plan to be successful you will need to use analytics tools to gather and evaluate the results of the published content. Based on the insights received from the analytics you will be able to identify the content that your consumers are interacting with the most or the least. Knowing these insights you will know which content you should continue to create. 

Keep in mind! As an eCommerce business, you also need to remember to optimise your product feed, as it is an important tool in social commerce. Optimised product feeds are crucial for your eCommerce business because they can be the difference between an effective online campaign and a waste of money spent online.

Haven’t you yet heard how you can save time with Product Feed Management? Book a free Demo of the WakeupData platform and learn how to prepare and optimise your feed!

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has a significant impact on the eCommerce business’ abilities to offer better customer experiences and create creative solutions. AI solutions offer a significant amount of potential to help eCommerce businesses with their daily operations and make them more targeted and efficient.

Today many AI solutions are so accessible and easy that 63% of people are even unaware that they interact with them, says a HubSpot survey. This proves that you can use AI for your eCommerce site indirectly or even without your users realising it. 

Chatbots

In retail stores, consumers can speak about problems or queries with staff, while in online stores customers typically conduct their own research. And if they have questions or concerns they will reach out to your contact email or online chat. You probably wonder why it matters if your eCommerce business has a chatbot - is online chat not enough?

With a chatbot, your eCommerce business will have a constantly available salesperson that can engage with clients one-on-one. A chatbot can help close a service gap if you are a smaller business or just can’t cover all time zones yet. Customers can contact the chatbot 24 / 7, and the more they utilise the bot, the more knowledgeable it becomes. 

Personalised advertising campaigns

By gathering customer data AI can assist in creating content and recommendations that are specifically suited for a given client. In order to improve marketing campaigns and personalise customer experiences, it can also forecast buying behaviour based on a user's internet browsing and search history, when data is legally available.

By providing customised product recommendations eCommerce companies can take advantage of impulse purchases. Recommending various products to customers at the checkout based on their chosen brands and categories, your eCommerce business can successfully cross-sell or upsell products.

5. Live shopping

Live shopping is known as retailers presenting their products through a livestream, often on a social media platform. This approach allows customers to ask questions, receive responses, and make purchases in real-time. The live selling key is interactivity. 

The popularity of live shopping is rising. It is predicted that the global live streaming market will reach €237 billion by 2027.

Brands have the chance to be creative in how they present their products, engage with users, and make sales. Better engagement, rapid increase in sales, increased brand awareness and prompt for impulse buying are key advantages of live shopping that your eCommerce business can gain.

6. Payment methods

As previously mentioned, having a seamless checkout can help your eCommerce business to boost sales. But what we mean is not only reducing steps till checkout but also having a diverse choice of payment methods. Did you know that a complicated checkout or payment process is one of the main causes of shopping cart abandonment? If a buyer finds it difficult to finish their digital purchase, they will leave products in the cart and will look for an eCommerce business that makes purchasing straightforward.

In 2021 approximately 50% of all eCommerce payment transactions worldwide occurred through digital wallets. Making the digital wallet the world's most widely used form of online payment. The prediction is that in 2025 this share will increase by over 53%.

But a digital wallet is not the only payment method. There are a lot of diverse payment methods all the way through Europe. It can depend from country to country which type of payment method consumers will choose. 

The most common payment types for eCommerce are:

• Digital wallets (PayPal, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Mobilepay)
• Cards (Visa, Mastercard, Dankort, Maestro)
• Buy now pay later (Klarna, Walley, AfterPay & ClearPay)
• Vouchers (PaySafeCard)
• Online banking

So, your eCommerce business really needs to take into consideration which countries you are selling your products in to provide easy payment options for customers from these geos.

7. Google Local Inventory Ads (LIA)

There is no doubt that Google LIA has become more and more popular throughout the last few years. Google started this project in 2017 and now it is available in 20 countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

As Google keeps expanding their project to more and more countries, your eCommerce business needs to act on it and see if  Google LIA is available in your country.

How does Google LIA work? When a user searches for a desired product on Google, available products in nearby stores will be highlighted. As a result, the buyer has the chance to visit the store to inspect or test the product before making a purchase, thus preventing needless purchases. Google claims that customers who have the chance to physically inspect the goods are more inclined to purchase it.

If you want to know more, read our blog post about Google LIA or if you are ready to implement Google LIA in your eCommerce strategy, book a meeting to learn how you can do it!

8. Cookies

You are probably surprised that we are mentioning cookies as a trend. More specifically third-party cookies. As you probably know, third-party cookies are little pieces of data that a web browser collects for future advertisement reasons to the user's computer or other devices while they are browsing a website.

We consider it important to mention it because Google is right now focusing on stepping away from third-party cookies in Google Chrome. And as more than 65% of the world’s population uses Chrome it is important that your eCommerce business pay attention to this.

Because of challenges connected with finding GDPR-friendly alternatives and ensuring that advertisers maintain their investments in the open web, the third-party cookies phase-out is postponed till 2023.

You are probably asking what will happen. The elimination of third-party cookies would make it more difficult for businesses to track the online behaviour of potential customers, which will have a big impact on techniques like remarketing and retargeting.

But as with everything else there are numbers of alternatives that businesses can use:

• First-party cookies. They are set by a website a user is currently browsing. They enable personalization of the content on that website and abide by data privacy regulations because they are stored locally and are not shared with outside parties.
• Google Privacy Sandbox. The Sandbox is a set of technologies designed to safeguard people's online privacy while still giving companies the tools they need to market effectively.
• Google's Publisher Provided Identifiers. This makes it possible for advertisers to create tailored ad campaigns that put privacy first. The functionality enables publishers to create unique target segments, deploy campaigns using programmatic guaranteed deals or conventional reservations, and increase their ad revenue.
• Digital Fingerprinting. Digital fingerprinting creates a distinctive "fingerprint" for each user by compiling data about their device. Through the use of third-party apps that users have installed on their devices, fingerprinting collects information. Instead of the website or app the user is using, a third party often handles fingerprinting. This third-party fingerprint may be loaded on numerous apps and websites to monitor a user across channels as they use their device.

9. Sustainability

It should not be surprising that sustainability has been a growing trend in the last few years, and it will keep growing. Did you know that 73% of customers worldwide claimed they would be willing to change their purchasing behaviour in order to reduce their impact on the environment? If your eCommerce business has not yet thought about adopting a sustainable strategy, this is the right time.

You are probably wondering what a sustainable business is. It is an environmentally friendly eCommerce business that aims to operate with as little negative impact on the environment as possible, to meet the needs of the present without jeopardising future generations.

But that is not the only way to define sustainability. To be sustainable an eCommerce business also needs to consider its impact on society, the environment, and human well-being.

Conclusions

Trends change constantly, and the digital world is no different. It's essential that you adapt to one or more of the above trends if you want to improve your eCommerce business strategy and increase sales. 

When you are developing your 2023 eCommerce strategy remember to focus also on providing a customer-centric experience. After all, if you have the tools to make your customer's online buying experience better, why not do it? Doing so will help your eCommerce business to stand out among your competitors.