Humans are a creature of habit.
We love our habits, but we also like them challenged.
Whenever the market presents a new toy for the customer to play with, we are only awed by it for some time before integrating it into our daily lives. And so, every once in a while we like something new and shiny to catch our eye and break us away from the monotony of the world we live.
The same applies to Online Shopping. Every once in a while, retailers need to present a new form of disruption to the consumers to keep them engaged and interested. The biggest disruptions of all times have been the smartphone. It has integrated itself so well into our lives, that we wake up and the first thing we look at is our phones.
Let’s take a look at what kind of disruptions are in store for us in 2018-
1. Keywords and multi-sensory inputs
Up until a few years ago, the primary way of looking for something online was to type it out in Google search or look for it on Amazon. Now we have voice initiated searches in online shopping. Welcome to the picture Siri, Alexa, and Cortana.
But that’s not all. You can look for something via image recognition in social networks, videos, chats, messaging and content. Any device with a sensor is a point of discovery for the product.
2. Use of infinite channels
Giants like Amazon and Walmart offer a vast variety of products in their online shopping portals to fulfill a customer’s needs. But today the consumers are getting to know about products through social networks, chats, messages, ads and the product in the physical world itself. So their expectations are obviously higher.
A new trend that is making waves recently is to make a product shoppable. That is, you don’t need to sell the product, you need to sell what it can do. Channels like Pinterest Houzz, Ebates etc.
have a very high marketing potential which many retailers haven’t realized yet. The driving force behind this phenomenon is the digitization of product information, which makes it possible to shop anywhere and at any time.
3. From top product to infinite shelf
We all love when we have an array of things to choose from. The sheer joy of selecting something from a wide variety is simply something else. That’s where globalization plays a very important role. Today, online shopping allows us to access anything we want from any part of the world.
The shelf has simply become infinite. You can access infinite music on Spotify, videos on YouTube and Tailor experiences on Expedia.
The infinite shelf is a phenomenon that has recently become very popular. People are not shopping for things from all over the world and their experience is only made better by smooth shipping services, improving consumer services and product quality.
A recent phenomenon has come up where the US customers are shopping directly from China Merchants. Retailers really need to keep up with the expanding markets and communications to be successful.
4. Recommendations for Personalization
Amazon has always had the upper hand in recommending products based on one’s consumer history and shopping behavior. Spotify and Netflix have pushed it further by taking into account one’s locations and emotional contexts.
Context has become an essential component for presenting the right product at the right time.
Consumers have now started expecting the ‘perfect product’ that matches their current state, every time they go shopping on the web or in the physical world.
Looking to keep up with the disruptions for 2018? Contact us at Datahut, your big data experts.