Joanna James
In this day and age when technology has a part to play in almost all facets of our lives, businesses need to relook at their digital marketing strategies in order to keep abreast of the competition. Entities that can successfully foresee the future and redefine it by introducing new ways of incorporating digital media into their strategies will have a good chance of surviving. This article includes interesting e-commerce trends that will result in a paradigm shift in the way businesses operate.
Today's consumers desire versatility and convenience that online shopping gives them while at the same time yearning for a physical store's interaction. One of the greatest misgivings that buyers who engage in online shopping have is the difficulty of processing returns. By operating a brick and mortar store this issue can be successfully resolved. Having a physical space helps businesses build unique brand personalities by providing face to face interactions as well. Many modern day businesses that have chosen to do sales solely on the internet have now opened physical stores in order to provide customers a range of complementary services that help boost brand image. As an example Nordstrom's 30,000 square feet store offers tailoring services, try ons as well as stylists without featuring merchandise. Buyers who place orders via their online store can visit this site to pick up or return the items that they have bought too.
Online shoppers do not have the luxury of interacting with a shop assistant. To address this many internet based retail businesses have introduced the option of virtual chatting with support staff. In developing countries where e-commerce is still at a fairy early stage, this feature is of paramount importance to customers. Websites such as Clicknshop which are rapidly gaining popularity among those who engage in online shopping in Sri Lanka have used this feature quite successfully.
With the advent of smart phones more and more consumers are turning to their mobiles to engage in online transactions. Therefore businesses need to now look at incorporating their checkout processes into smart phone apps. Alibaba, one of the most progressive internet marketing companies in the world saw 90% of their record breaking USD 25.4 billion 'Singles Day' sales in the year 2017, coming through mobile devices.
With so many retailers embracing digital technology to carry out sales, the need for better ways of calculating ROI became quite strong. An effective method of calculating the in-store ROI of digital ads was developed successfully which catapulted the success of the industry to new levels. Advanced ROPO Ratios ("Research Online- Purchase Offline) help retailers to assess which of their online tools help increase the customer footfall in their physical stores.
More and more consumers now have the ability to ascertain how a particular product in an online store would look in their own homes or office spaces prior to making a purchase. This has greatly helped to reduce the rate of returns and increased the sales of businesses as well. Popular apps such as Houzz allow users to visually compare how over 500,000 products would fit into their home or office spaces. IKEA Place is yet another immensely popular app that helps users to successfully experiment with the looks of the products in catalogues.
As online shopping becomes universal, photo shopping is gaining rapid popularity as it successfully removes the barrier of language. Using this innovative method, consumers can now use image based searches when searching for products online. This eliminates ambiguity and vagueness of the searches while resulting in increased efficiency of the sellers' product information management investments.
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