Web development for ecommerce: 5 technology trends for 2019
Online shopping is fast becoming one of the main ways to purchase goods in the world. According to forecasts, by 2021, global e-commerce sales will reach $ 4.5 trillion, which is almost two times more than in 2017.
This growth is largely due to the introduction of modern technology. Today we will talk about what technological trends will be relevant in ecommerce in the coming year.
The development of electronic wallet technology
In the field of e-commerce, one of the main problems has always been the acceptance and processing of payments. Retailers needed to store customers' billing information and risk getting in trouble if they were hacked and leaked, or rely on third-party processing systems and lose revenue because of their high fees.
Losses due to credit card fraud in 2017 amounted to $ 24.71 billion, according to statistics, almost half of bank card holders in the United States have been faced with the theft of their financial data over the past five years.
The e-wallet technology (eWallets) allows a business and its customers to complete transactions without having to disclose sensitive data such as bank card numbers. In the case of an eWallet, credit card information is encrypted and can only be accessed with a special pin code, password, fingerprint, or face scan.
At the same time, to call such wallets definitely safe tool can not. Moreover, if an attacker manages to crack a user's wallet, he will get access to all the bank cards stored in it.
For companies, eWallet technology support is also not always convenient due to the large number of such solutions. Need to support tools like Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal and Stripe. Despite its shortcomings, according toit is predicted that by 2021 this technology should become the most popular among online users.
More chat bots
HYIP around chat bots, which was very widely discussed in 2016-2017, has recently been dropped. Now it is no longer represented as something that will change the way communications between people and computers are arranged. However, bots have taken their niche in user support. One of the applications of such tools is to help online shoppers.
According to statistics, by 2020, bots will be responsible for processing 85% of business interactions with users.
One of the most successful e-commerce chat bots is the eBay product ShopBot. The project was launched in 2016 on the Facebook Messenger platform. The bot helps users search for products in the eBay catalog - they send him descriptions of the goods or send photos, receiving the necessary links in response.
There will be more and more such tools, although the development of a high-quality bot that not only works well, but is able to generate personalized recommendations that take into account the context, will still be expensive. Therefore, it is necessary to expect the spread of technology primarily in the case of large ecommerce companies.
More advanced mobile store versions
Most online interactions today are made using mobile devices. According to the OuterBox, in 2017, 62% of smartphone users made a purchase from their devices at least once. For the USA alone, this gives 75 million buyers, worldwide, their number is hundreds of millions. The penetration of smartphones and tablets continues, which contributes to the growth in the number of mobile buyers.
However, simply launching the version of the online store adapted for mobile devices has long been insufficient. Despite the fact that almost all online retailers have done this for a long time, according to statistics, 84% of buyers experienced difficulties with conducting transactions from a smartphone. Another figure from the OuterBox report is important here - 40% of users who have encountered problems with a purchase declare that they will go to competitors.
Therefore, companies will invest even more resources in the development of UX on mobile platforms. This means, among other things, SEO optimization, adaptive templates for important pages, SMS integration, and adaptation of visual materials for display on small screens.
Smart pricing and MAP monitoring
Retailers have been using the dynamic pricing approach for quite a long time, in which the price is set based on the current market situation and the actions of competitors. And if previously such changes and monitoring were mainly conducted manually, now new technologies are increasingly being used to solve this problem.
For example, there are already solutions that involve the use of artificial intelligence to analyze the market situation, which evaluates information on demand, prices of competitors, delivery costs in each case, and dynamically changes prices for different products.
Another important point here is monitoring the minimum advertised price (Minimum Advertised Price, MAP). In some cases, by mistake, retailers may show users a price that is lower than the price set by the supplier of the goods. This means that if the buyer pays, he will not be able to receive the goods. Such situations always lead to negative and loss of customers. To avoid such problems, retailers will more actively implement MAP monitoring tools.
Optimization of the range using AI
Growing competition also forces retailers to more actively optimize their product catalogs. Artificial intelligence can be used not only to determine the most appropriate prices for goods, but also to select these products themselves.
AI can analyze historical data, compare them with current market trends to determine the competitiveness of a product. As a result, in the automatic mode, some goods fall into the catalog, something is removed from it, some goods are saved or moved on the pages.
Such tools and data are available to large retailers who actively use them. For example, Walmart appliesThis approach - unpopular products and products with negative reviews are removed from the online catalog, they are replaced by products that sell well or help pull customers from competitors. The use of new technologies allowed the company to increase its online catalog from 700 thousand products in 2011 to 60 million in 2017-2018.