By The e-commerce world is a very dynamic one and that’s why we want to look at the popular tech trends. As technologies improve or change, the way we interact, live, and do business continues to change.
What this means is, as a player in the e-commerce world, understanding how tech trends affect your business will help you stay in business. Turning a blind eye to these trends will give your competitors an edge over you because people will always choose personal satisfaction over brand loyalty.
With the rapid change in consumer shopping behaviors or habits, we’ve prepared a list of the top 10 tech trends that will shake up the e-commerce industry in 2023. Study these trends and understand how they’ll affect your business. But most importantly, try to learn how you can leverage them to make your business better.
Let’s get right into it.
10 Tech Trends That Will Affect E-commerce in 2023
Table of Contents
Here are the top 10 trends that are likely to shake up e-commerce and change the way you do business in 2023:
1. Internet of Things
The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to physical devices with sensors and processing abilities that are connected to the internet and are used to transmit data and enhance communication between devices. These devices are in the form of smart cars, smartwatches, automated homes, motion detection lights, etc.
What do you need to know about the Internet of Things? How can the Internet of Things or similar devices affect e-commerce?
Smart business owners will learn better ways to track customer goods and improve their logistics to always meet demands. They can also automate inventory management and have real-time information about stock movements.
Furthermore, retailers can use the information shared by IoTs to personalize their services to their customers and even automate the entire shopping process. The impact of IoT on inventory management is that these IoT devices help to provide real-time visibility across warehouse, production and distribution centers.
Check out this article to learn about how the Internet of Things is transforming other businesses.
2. Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation involves using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools to automate and improve business processes.
Businesses are adopting hyperautomation to make their services better and reduce operating costs. As an e-commerce retailer, you have to figure out what part of your business process you need to automate.
Automating things like your inventory management means you’d get real-time information about what goods are coming in and leaving the store. It also means you need fewer storekeepers, thereby reducing operating costs in your business. This is where e-commerce automation comes in handy.
What is e-commerce automation? E-commerce automation is the software that helps your online retail store to convert most or all of the manual, repetitive tasks into self-fulfilling, automated tasks. E-commerce automation also gives you meaningful customer behavior analysis that could help you prepare better-suited marketing campaigns to improve sales.
3. Internet of Behavior
The Internet of Behavior, or IoB, combines IoT, behavioral science, and data analytics to understand why people make certain purchasing decisions.
Understanding the triggers or reasons why people make those purchasing decisions will help you as a retailer to tailor your services to meet their needs.
IoB will help you see a pattern in the behavioral actions of your customers. You’ll get to know the kind of products they search for when they come to your platform, the device they do so with, and the time they do it. With that information, you’ll draw up an effective sales and marketing campaign that targets people of similar interests and demographics.
Ultimately, IoB will help you improve your customer service. You’ll understand better how to resolve issues customers come up with and leave them satisfied.
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4. Augmented Reality
This is one of the most underrated tech trends that will affect e-commerce operations and practices in 2023. Retailers are slowly adopting it, and it’s helping them make better sales.
Augmented reality, also known as mixed reality, is a visual, interactive technology that presents important digital information in the context of the physical environment. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality only augments what is already present in your real world.
You might ask, “How will augmented reality help my e-commerce business?” I will tell you.
Augmented Reality will help reduce returns in your business, as customers must have visualized how a product will appear in real life before making a purchase. Your augmented reality feature will help customers picture how a TV, furniture, or even clothes they want to order will look in the real world. This eliminates the doubt they would have over how the product will appear in their homes or body.
Quite a good number of shopping apps are already utilizing Augmented Reality (AR) to increase their customer base. Shopping apps currently utilizing AR include but are not limited to Home Depot, Amazon, Nike, Target, IKEA Place, EQ3, Wayfair, Heem, Target, etc. Some of them are based in the United States, Canada and Europe.
5. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a constantly evolving technology that is designed to study and mimic human intelligence. It uses the information gathered to set up processes that make the human experience simpler and better.
Artificial intelligence has several trendy applications for e-commerce, and adopting a couple of them guarantees a surge in your sales. You can apply AI to product search and recommendation, logistics and order fulfillment, inventory management, and customer service.
Failure to adopt as many AIs as possible means you’ll be leaving a lot of sales on the table, and your competitors won’t hesitate to leverage that and push you out of business. The clothing and fashion industry is revolutionized today because of the impact of artificial intelligence in the e-commerce sector.
6. Voice Searching
This is a tech trend that’s fast changing how customers search for products in e-commerce stores. Most retailers are adopting speech-to-text assistants in their e-commerce businesses, and you should do the same.
People are becoming lazier as the days go by and are looking for ways to make their lives really convenient. Therefore, adopting voice search in your e-commerce platform will help make purchasing easy for your customers.
Why is optimizing for voice search important in growing your e-commerce business? Optimizing your e-commerce product description for voice search increases your chances of ranking on Google’s featured snippets.
Just the same way you optimize your content so it can be discovered by users during Google search, you should optimize your content for voice search. You can do this by writing clear and succinct product descriptions and ensuring you provide direct answers to questions your customers might have. Doing this can increase your chances of ranking for the featured snippets.
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7. Chatbots in E-commerce
If you have yet to activate chatbots in your e-commerce store, then you should know that you are risking losing lots of customers. Chatbots can help your business in many ways. From the moment a customer is looking to make a purchase to after-sales services.
With chatbots, you can direct customers, who could have left your platform out of confusion, to make purchases with ease. The bot could take input from the customers and make product suggestions for them. The bot will be of great assistance after sales are made and customers have inquiries or complaints to make about the product.
Most businesses will be adopting chatbot technology in 2023, and you shouldn’t be left behind. One of the most outstanding benefits of chatbots in e-commerce is that it helps you maintain communication and support with your customers 24/7.
8. 5G Network
The introduction of the 5G network has seen many businesses adjust their processes to take advantage of the numerous opportunities it presents.
The 5G network is the 5th generation of cellular network technology. The world is projected to see a global economic value of $13.2 trillion by 2035 because of the introduction of the 5G network.
The e-commerce industry will experience a significant shift with the rapid global adoption of 5G networks. People will have faster access to search results and the latency rates will be greatly reduced. You can integrate this by updating your store’s web and mobile applications to match the speed of 5G searches. Businesses that fail to do this will see customers leave due to high latency in product searches.
9. Blockchain Tech Trends in E-commerce
Blockchain technology is rapidly changing the ways we make and receive payments. In the coming years, customers will be more confident in making purchases from e-commerce stores as they are sure of the safety of their financial details.
Several e-commerce platforms are adopting blockchain technology, and by 2023 the adoption rate should be at an all-time high. This is one of the common tech trends that will reduce shopping cart abandonment to a large extent.
Cart abandonment is a purchasing activity where a customer gets to the checkout page of a store and leaves without completing the purchase. This could happen because the customer is uncertain about the security of payment handling on the platform. Blockchain technology will eliminate this uncertainty and help your customers make quicker purchasing decisions.
You should study blockchain technology and how you can integrate it into your online and offline businesses. As we speak now, the impact of blockchain technology on the finance industry is already visible to the blind and audible to the deaf.
10. Mobile Commerce
According to eMarketer, retail mobile commerce (m-commerce) sales were $359.32 billion in 2021, which was a 15.2% increase over 2020. It also projects a 44.2% increase in 2025, which will amount to $728.28 billion in sales revenue.
What is mobile commerce? Mobile commerce refers to shopping for products with the use of mobile phones. With m-commerce looking to trump e-commerce in the near future, you should be working towards taking advantage of the trend. But, how do you do that?
How do you position your e-commerce business for mobile commerce? It is by ensuring your retail store is mobile-friendly, i.e., making it easily accessible to mobile shoppers. You do that by developing your store to be flexible enough to compress when being accessed from a mobile device. The store pages should also load as fast as possible when accessed from a mobile device. As mobile banking technology has been improving, so also should mobile commerce.
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- How to Start an E-commerce Business: 5 Key Steps
- 5 Rock-Solid Ways You Can Optimize Your Site for Mobile to Boost Traffic
- 5 Key Benefits of Using an E-commerce Price Monitoring or Competitor Price Tracking Tool
Conclusion
Staying relevant and profitable in the e-commerce industry requires you to always look out for important tech trends that are likely to affect your business. You should study these trends and how they might affect your business in the future, and also look for ways to leverage them to improve your business operations.
This article has introduced to you the latest tech trends that are likely to affect your e-commerce business next year and how you can take advantage of the opportunities they present. I hope you’ll do all you can to take advantage of the opportunities these trends present.
