The world of e-commerce constantly gives rise to unique challenges and opportunities not felt by the high street. But this sector is also rapidly moving, and sometimes half the battle can lie in merely keeping up with the latest techniques and approaches to effective online retail in the 2020s.
In light of this, we’re taking a look at the top e-commerce trends we’ve identified in 2023 – each points to meaningful developments in the industry, from accommodating emergent technologies, to adapting to shifting consumer behaviour.
Diverse payment providers: getting ready for Web3
One of the largest areas of change in the modern e-commerce space of late is an industry-wide approach to payment providers. Whereas in the past, online retailers were largely content to offer Visa, MasterCard and potentially Amex as payment options, the rise of fintech and e-wallets has added greater complexity to this picture.
Now people are accustomed to being able to redeem payments in a good variety of ways – from paying with their physical cards, to using e-wallets like Google Wallet or Apple Pay, or perhaps using a digital fin-tech card to complete a purchase. We’ve also seen the growing popularity of buy-now-pay-later models like Klarna.
All of this is an ongoing trend that shows no sign of stopping. While we’re still several years out from Web3 – the supposed next-generation of the internet, that will be based upon decentralized systems and the blockchain – this is one of the areas we’ll begin to see it appear first. This is because many find great value in the notion of being able to pay for things directly with crypto-currencies.
At present, there are regulatory and legislative issues with this to be ironed out, as the potential volatility of even well-established crypto assets like Bitcoin is well known. But it’s only a matter of time before offering customers the ability to make payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other tokens will become a reality.
Curated offers and recommendations
Just when it felt like the take-over of smart algorithms was all but complete, a sea-change in certain sectors is rolling back the tide of automated data filtering. There’s no denying the fact that algorithms are immensely useful, and basically essential in our modern world.
From choosing what to watch next on Netflix, to remembering to buy batteries for your new torch – algorithms jump in and provide us with specific recommendations just when we need them.
But there are some things that they cannot achieve. For example, they can’t confer a sense of trust or expertise in anything like the way a human can. In certain sectors, this really matters. In light of this, we’re increasingly seeing the rise of ‘human curation’ as an alternative – or antidote – to algorithmic top lists and recommendations everywhere.
For example, CasinoBonusCA is an iGaming platform providing services to the Canadian market. It prides itself on offering a huge array of casino welcome bonus and other sign-up offers to its patrons. Notably, this platform goes out of its way to serve up reviews of online casinos conducted by its panel of industry experts, and leverages this commitment as a means of demonstrating its quality and reliability to consumers.
The rise of the robots
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ve no doubt noticed that the world is abuzz with excitement and trepidation over the latest generation of AI tools and models such as Midjourney, and ChatGPT.
AI has been a key part of global e-commerce for a number of years now, with the most obvious customer-facing example of this being the many AI-assistant chatbots popping up on e-commerce web stores of all scales.
But AI will, indeed, lead to major changes in the industry. Exploring the full implications of what large language models represent for online commerce is beyond the scope of this article, but if we look at the short-term ways customer relations will be impacted it should become clear that this is big news.
In essence, AI will be able to provide a personalized shopping experience to customers – in effect, everyone will be able to benefit from their own personal shopper. This AI assistant will be able to provide recommendations, answer questions, assess outfits for color-matching, or provide bespoke discounts to customers.