Top Ecommerce Trends In 2021

It’s been a reasonably wild year for ecommerce. Wait, strike that. It’s just been a wild year. Period.

From the pandemic to protests and everything in between, something significant went on in 2020 that has affected almost everyone.

Regardless of how 2020 has affected you personally, though, if you’re in ecommerce, it’s certainly affected how you are doing business. If you’re lucky, most of those changes are changes for the higher , but there have still been tons of challenges to tackle and overcome.

In this article, we wanted to require a step back, check out what’s been happening within the world of e-commerce, and provides you some expert advice on the way to handle the varied changes, challenges, and opportunities you’re facing.

To do that, I’ve called in our own in-house ecommerce experts. Between them, they need decades of experience within the industry and that they keep close tabs on exactly what's happening—and what it means for our clients.

So, with all of that in mind, let’s mention what happening in ecommerce this year and what you would like to try and do to form sure your business comes out on top.

COVID-19 is Changing Ecommerce

Whether you’re a staunch supporter of masks and social distancing or think COVID-19 is all some kind of conspiracy theory (or, like most folks , you don’t really know what to think), one things for sure: COVID-19 is changing the globe of ecommerce.

quarantine restrictions across the planet have forced people to work out new ways to urge the items they need . The typical buyer has been trained over the past several months to get more things online than ever before. As a result, their trust in buying digitally has increased out necessarily .

In addition, buyers also are trained to expect more and more when buying online. Amazon holds the keys to driving consumer expectations, and they’re becoming familiar with 1-day free shipping, free returns, buy and check out it before paying, etc. To compete online, retailers need to get as on the brink of these offerings as possible—or have really strong value props that Amazon can’t deliver (good luck!).

Adapting to Your Customers’ Expectations

As customer expectations change, ecommerce businesses got to change, too. If people need to buy your shipping, await weeks for his or her product to arrive or affect a frustrating returns policy, you’re getting to lose their business to a more accommodating competitor.

To put it simply, to survive in today’s fast-paced ecommerce climate, your business must be the straightforward , obvious solution. Your products got to be easy to seek out , easy to shop for , easy to return and—most of all—an easy alternative to big sites like Amazon.

How does one manage all of that? Well, it’ll take some work, but here are a couple of easy ways to urge started (and for even more tips, inspect this article):

1. Take Paid Search Advertising Seriously

While many ecommerce businesses tend to fixate on paid social advertising channels like Facebook and Instagram, it’s important to recollect that as people buy more frequently online, tons of their purchases will start with a Google search.

This is why optimizing and improving product feeds has become such an enormous area of focus.

Many of your customers already know that they need what you’re selling. You just got to be easy for them to seek out .

Google Search Ads—especially on Google Shopping—are a good, easy way to get ahead of individuals when their purchasing intent is highest.

So, if you haven’t doubled down on your paid search advertising strategy for a while, now's an excellent time to urge serious about Google Ads. The ROI is usually insane compared to higher-funnel channels like Facebook Ads, therefore the results are nearly always well worth the effort.

2. Flesh Out Your Funnel

One of the explanations, why paid search ads are so effective, is because they aim rock bottom of the funnel. By the time people are checking out your products online, they know what they want…they’re just trying to make a decision which business to shop for from.

However, it often takes tons of exposure, consideration and learning for a possible customer to succeed in that level of buying intent.

There’s an immediate correlation between the amount of selling channels businesses invest in and their overall marketing success rate.

The trick is to look at all of your marketing channels as a part of one united customer journey.

Most successful clients understand that their paid social ads are a fundamentally higher funnel marketing channel. They don’t have an equivalent performance expectations for paid social advertising as they are doing for, say Google Ads, but they also recognize that their Google Ads performance is directly influenced by the cash they’re spending on paid social.

The better you understand your overall marketing funnel and the way each marketing channel fits into your buyer journey, the better it's to work out what messages your customers need at each step in their journey. It takes time, testing and data to work all of this out, but it’s the sole thanks to make sure that your customers are seeing the proper ads at the proper times.

3. Stop Worrying About Your Checkout Experience

As people get more and more habit to making purchases online, the precise details of your checkout experience matter less and fewer . This is often a touch counterintuitive for several ecommerce marketers.

After all, with almost 70% of online shopping carts left abandoned, the sole possible explanation is that otherwise excited would-be customers are being turned off by some aspect of the checkout experience…right?

While there are ecommerce sites out there with truly terrible checkout experiences, most of the default checkout experiences provided by ecommerce platforms like Shopify are pretty consistent and intuitive. If there was some secret checkout experience formula that guaranteed great results, these platforms would be highly incentivized to supply it to their customers.

After all, if Shopify could claim that their checkout experience cut cart abandonment in half, businesses would flock to their platform in droves.

Since offering an efficient , seamless checkout experience may be a critical a part of running an ecommerce business, it’s logical to assume that the quality checkout experiences provided by most platforms are pretty good.

If that’s the case, though, then most checkout experiences are probably about nearly as good as they will be, so cart abandonment must flow from to something aside from the checkout experience.

So, if your checkout abandonment is 20% above average (and you don’t have crazy shipping or another surprise in your checkout process), you almost certainly didn’t put in enough legwork to convey value higher within the funnel. Your customers aren’t truly sold once they add something to their cart or start the checkout process, so when push involves shove…they don’t buy.

If you discover yourself during this situation, you would like to review your overall funnel. Consider how you’re selling your products, what your value proposition is and what you would like to try and do to urge people excited to buy—long before they even believe finding out .

4. Work on Your Product Descriptions

Along these lines, we recommend taking a tough check out your product descriptions. While images are a critically important a part of selling products online, many businesses became so focused on imagery that they’ve put little-to-no effort into their product descriptions.

That’s a drag , because while pictures are often worth thousand words, sometimes there’s tons of power to easily telling people what your product is, how it works, and why they ought to be excited to shop for it.

Here’s a fast example:

1) Why customers should want the merchandise , 2) What makes it comfortable and sturdy , and 3) How the merchandise makes them ‘cool’ and a part of the group.

The results spoke for themselves.

Sales for every product went up by a minimum of 50% (some by over 100%). Remember, the sole thing we changed was the merchandise descriptions, so clearly customers were reading and responding to the descriptions.

Of course, the importance and impact of your product descriptions will depend tons on your business and what you’re selling. But, in competitive spaces—like apparel, gadgets, or anything where there’s a million alternatives—stores who justify their product and make a aura about it through text also as imagery seem to fare much better and lose less customers to alternate offerings.

5. Improve Your Fulfillment Processes

The success of ecommerce giants like Amazon or Wal-Mart boils right down to one simple thing: their fulfillment process. With their ability to supply 2-day, 1-day, or maybe same-day shipping and no-questions-asked, free returns, these companies have made online shopping as easy and risk-free as hopping in your car and making a sale face to face .

And it’s changing the way people view ecommerce.

A few years ago, these sorts of delivery times were simply impossible. Today, your customers are starting to expect them. to stay up, your fulfillment process must be as seamless and speedy as possible.

Of course, not many ecommerce companies can hope to match the size and size of Amazon’s fulfillment network, but there are often tons of belongings you can do to enhance your fulfillment process. The closer you'll get to matching your customers’ expectations, the better it'll be to win their business.

6. Stay Competitive

Not many businesses can (or want to) attempt to compete with Amazon. There aren’t an entire lot of the way to compete with a business with Amazon’s resources.

That being said, you don’t need to beat Amazon to convert your customers. You simply need to find out the way to stay competitive.

Learn from the big dogs. Find out what your customers love about sites like Amazon or Wal-Mart. Then, find out what they value most…what they actually need .

As exciting as fast shipping and straightforward returns are, people don’t buy from Amazon because they need fast shipping. They buy because they need a specific product for a few reason. Fast shipping and straightforward returns are just a bonus.

If you'll identify what it's that your customers actually need and specialise in that in your marketing, you don’t need to have Amazon’s fulfillment network to urge people to shop for from you. Amazon features a lot going for it, but they need their justifiable share of issue and that they don’t have your understanding of your specific market.

Do what you'll to imitate what Amazon is doing well…and then specialise in what you'll offer your customers that Amazon can’t. Don’t attempt to beat Amazon at their own game. Learn from their game then play by your own rules.

7. Build a Brand Following

Finally, as consumers still migrate more of their buying online and advertising costs begin to climb, it’s an honest time to recollect the old adage that it’s cheaper to retain an existing customer than to accumulate a replacement one.

These kinds of insights become particularly valuable when it involves mapping out your full-funnel strategy—especially your remarketing ads and re-engagement emails.

Thanks to COVID-19, more people than ever are looking to shop for online, so it’s a golden opportunity to create a loyal brand following. Your customers are trying to find businesses they will trust, therefore the more you engage with them, the more likely they're to buy…and keep it up buying for years to return .

Conclusion

The world of ecommerce has changed tons within the past few months and—thanks to the present global pandemic—online shopping is seeing unprecedented growth. Ecommerce is changing. The question is: will your business keep up?

If this all seems a touch overwhelming, don’t worry. You don’t need to roll in the hay all on your own. We’ve got many content here on the blog to assist you out.

And, you don’t have tackle everything directly , either.

If you haven’t been investing much into paid search or Google Shopping, start thereupon . If your funnel isn’t very well-developed, maybe that’s a far better place to focus immediately . Or, maybe your product descriptions could use some work.

Whether it’s that, or updating your fulfillment process, finding ways to remain competitive with the big dogs or making the foremost of your existing customers pick the aspect of your business that needs the foremost work immediately and specialise in that. Then, once you’ve got that working right, advance to your next priority then forth.

Running an ecommerce business is all about changing, growing and keeping tabs on things as trends rise and fall. during this article, we’ve talked about a number of the foremost important trends this year, so specialise in these areas for now and you’ll be headed within the right direction.

Oh, and if you’d like our team of experts to offer you a hand together with your ecommerce marketing, allow us to know here or within the comments. We’d like to help!

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