The eCommerce industry has been experiencing steady growth over the last few years. Report by Statista shows that global retail eCommerce revenue will amount to $6.6 trillion by 2021 and it’s a challenge for all e-store owners.  So, in the coming years, we should expect to see continual growth with more businesses joining the market. In this article, we’ll discuss the top emerging eCommerce trends in 2019 you should follow to stand in the competition.

eCommerce Trends in 2019

Trend#1: Power of Automation and Personalization

Compared to other traditional retail shopping, eCommerce stores requires face to face personal interaction. Normally online stores do not have a retail clerk for marketing and promoting. To mimic this experience, eCommerce companies leverage automation opportunities throughout the shopping journey.

On this aspect, Automation means creation and technological application to boost all the processes like sales or marketing, management systems, production or delivery services. With the high traffic of numbers of users who come to your online store, the higher automation processes will turn your store into a selling machine. That’s why automation is very important in the future eCommerce development. This will improve your client’s experience, level-up the conversion rate and save your times and efforts.

Personalization is the next step of eCommerce modernization. The future of eCommerce business trends will depend directly on this feature. Using personal online data such as queries, page visits and purchase history, brands transform their online stores to best serve the customer’s needs and interests. Many progressive e-solutions reach the higher level of user-friendliness due to various types of recommendations and tips to ease the individual user experience on their online store.

Trend#2: Chatbots and AI

A chatbot is a kind of software that is either pre-programmed or powered by AI to hold conversations with human users. These interactions are mostly text-based, but through the conversational interfaces, they can occur vocally as well.

Some companies have been testing on chatbots. Many Facebook-based e-store also use some chatbot functionalities to answer FAQs or facilitate transactions. Since it is easy to set up, we can expect a steady increase in use and overall good adoption from smaller business.

AI assistants can handle a number of tasks that you can assign to a human, such as managing inventory or handling inquiries. These digital assistants can save your time to focus on running your business.

Trend#3: B2B eCommerce

For years, B2C eCommerce has led the way with B2B eCommerce are lagging behind, as technology platforms failed to properly support the complex needs of B2B. But times have changed. B2B companies are leveraging upcoming eCommerce trends, also.

The B2B businesses have earned $7.7 trillion in 2017, compared to B2C companies it is three times more. The business-to-customer (B2C) firms has earned $2.4 trillion.

Experts make predictions that B2B eCommerce sales will increase worldwide to $6.6 trillion by 2020.

B2B is becoming more experiential with gesture and voice embracing them and leveraging them in customer contact.

Trend#4: OmniChannel Personalization

Omnichannel means the ability to personalize “across” all channels—including web, mobile, in-store, email and direct mail channels. In other sense, omnichaneel means combining the ability to understand how an individual interacts with a brand in all channels, with the ability to act on that understanding by customizing their experience across every touchpoint. “Omnichannel personalization” refers to both the capacity to collect information with interaction and the ability to deploy it no matter where the interaction takes place, for a consistent and contextually informed customer experience.

As the industry trend moves consistently toward comprehensive omnichannel personalization, those brands that fail to recognize actual users across devices will stand out for their inability to provide a smooth customer experience.

There is a huge challenge when it comes to offering a seamless personalized experience across all channels:

• Only 27% of marketers in the study report are syncing half or more of their channels.
• 46% have managed to connect with a few channels.
• And 27% don’t have any connected channels.

So, we should expect to see more marketers focusing on omnichannel personalization in this year.

Trend#5: Content Marketing

Content marketing is still a relatively new phenomenon. It is still an efficient way to lock your audience coming again and again to your site – and buying from time to time.

Content marketing is helping eCommerce store better engage with customers, provide information and ultimately sell products. Content marketing and SEO have become very closely connected to each other.

In 2019, content marketing will continue to grow and impact on eCommerce marketing.

Trend#6: Voice Search

The motto of e-commerce development in 2019 is “Smart and even smarter”. According to WordStream voice searches will be 50% of all searches by 2020 and it will grab SEO.

Young children who cannot write or type yet can use voice search to find their favorite videos online.

So let’s connect to the dots. If a greater percentage of search queries are voice rather than text, marketers need to optimize not just for text, but for voice, too.

Trend#7: Dropshipping

Now a days Drop shipping is an extremely popular business model for new entrepreneurs. It’s possible to start a drop shipping business in e-commerce with limited funds.

This eCommerce business model is very easy to start, involves less risk and has many advantages:

• You’re only going to buy the product after a customer places an order into your store
• You don’t have to spend money on keeping inventory
• You’ll have low overhead costs

According to the Merchant eCommerce report out of 450 online stores, 16.4% were using dropshipping in 2018.

Businesses using this model experienced an average revenue growth of 32.7% and an average conversion rate of 1.74%.

This platform connects you with verified suppliers from all over the world and making it much easier to find products to sell.

Trend#8: Mobile Advertising

The last but not the least eCommerce trends you have to be ready to meet in is mobile advertising. Marketers have been working on mobile site optimization, responsive design and different mobile apps for years.

Mobile is by no means new and also mobile advertising. However, in 2019 you should be investing a greater percentage of your eCommerce business into mobile.

According to study report, there are more than 1.2 billion mobile users all over the world. And more than half of all Pay-per-Click (PPC) conversions reportedly come from mobile devices.

Conclusion

The eCommerce industry is growing dynamically every year. Pay attention to all the above mentioned eCommerce trends to keep the business up-to-date in the nowadays digital world.