Ecommerce
5 New Ecommerce Trends You Might Not Be Aware Of
While making your online store look unique and stand out from the crowd, innovations primarily should be intended to add a special value to your visitor online shopping experience. Better yet, try to offer your clients opportunities they could never hope to get in traditional brick-and-mortar stores and would hardly find at your online competitors.
Below I’m going to shed the light on some of the hottest trends in the ecommerce field that I hope will help you make your online venture a special one.
Ultimate Mobile and Tablet Experience
With the traffic that online stores get from smartphones, iPhones, tablet PCs, iPads, etc. growing at a rapid pace every single day, it’s quite obvious that the ecommerce market is entering a new mobile and tablet era. While providing modern customers with a pretty much more convenient shopping experience, iDevices and tablets create a new marketing channel for online business owners with multiple remarkable opportunities to grow and succeed in the Web.
Mobile technology expansion has resulted in a rather large diversity of devices and gadgets varying in sizes, screen dimensions and functionality. Creating multiple separate mobile versions of your online store to fit every particular device is definitely not a reasonable way out, since the whole process is rather time-consuming, while design, maintenance and update expenses may cost you a fortune.
Luckily, innovative web design technologies allow to avoid all related hassles and inconveniences of the segmented mobile approach and provide dramatically simplified solutions for this challenge. They make it possible to establish a multifunctional presence on the entire line of modern portable devices. With a single responsive website design, you can enjoy total peace of mind knowing that your online store easily adapts to any type of tablets and iDevices your visitors are using to access you while providing them with an ultimate shopping experience.
Virtual Try-On and Fitting Tools
Today, consumers go shopping online for virtually all types of products and goods. However, when it comes for clothing, shoes, eyeglasses, jewelry, etc. many people still opt for traditional retail stores with fitting rooms where they can try everything on to see how it looks and which item fits better.
If you are selling any of the related stuff through your online store, today you have a unique opportunity to attract more customers by implementing one of the latest ecommerce innovations-virtual fitting rooms and try-on tools that will let your customers try on and of as many items as they want to find the perfect fitting solution without leaving the comfort of their own homes or offices.
This technology is smart, yet quite simple – by using a standard webcam, anyone can instantly try on any chosen item. An application will automatically adjust and position this garment on the body. Some advanced solutions also allow to change the item’s color, move it around as well as to take a photo. This provides an additional awesome opportunity of sharing instantly these photos with friends on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to ask their opinion and advice.
Videos Instead of Long Product Descriptions
Videos will certainly make a significant contribution to your efforts of providing a more interactive shopping experience. You can replace long, boring product descriptions, specifications and static images with comprehensive, engaging videos to promote and sell virtually any types of products and services.
Moreover, cutting-edge technologies allow to integrate your videos with various clickable options that will guide your visitors, invite them to look through other related products and deals as well as initiate ordering and purchasing processes.
Guided Selling
As you will certainly agree, with full and proactive understanding of customer needs, you are most likely to offer exactly what they’re looking for. And this is where guided selling technologies come in very handy. In essence, guided selling is a complex process that is based on thorough analysis of customer requirements and aimed to bring together a prospective buyer and targeted products or services in the quickest possible way. Such tactics allow to facilitate purchasing decisions and increase conversion rates.
A guided selling system will ask a visitor some questions and offer various answer options to help him/her define his/her needs. After learning step-by-step about these needs and requirements, you will be able to generate an optimal proposal in all aspects – from product specifications and price to quality guarantee and shipping services. In other words, you will actually guide a buyer up to a successful purchase.
Social Shopping – Shop Together
It’s quite natural that we feel more confident in people that we actually know. Even if you have the most professional assistants in your customer support department, they can never compete with your customer friends in terms of convincing them to make a purchasing decision. Social networking opportunities allow to fulfill this gap.
Actually, social networking integration into the ecommerce field isn’t a new trend. But the latest applications go pretty much further than liking, sharing and twitting. From now on, you can offer your customers an ideal opportunity to co-shop, while they can discuss products, prices and deals in real time from different locations around the Globe.
However, when considering revolutionary new tactics for your online store, it’s highly advisable not to be carried away too far by these ideas, since what works well for ecommerce giants like Amazon isn’t supposed to work the same way for your particular online venture. Therefore, a thorough analysis of your strategies and new market trends will help you take your business to the next level of success.
Need a next step? Check out our exclusive Top 10 Sales Force Automation software report for a comparison of some of the top solutions out there right now.
[This is a guest post by Nicolas Fincher – a community manager at CS-Cart.com, an established provider of CS-Cart ecommerce solutions.]
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Nicolas Fincher
Expert in eCommerce Software
