The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated e-commerce innovation and online sales as more consumers started shopping online. The accelerated growth slowed down in 2022, but e-commerce in 2023 is projected to be 5% higher than before the pandemic.
Projected e-commerce revenue and growth rates worldwide will be 14% in 2023, 13% in 2024, and 12% in 2025, when the value will be $5.42 billion.
By 2026, e-commerce sales will amount to about 8.1 trillion dollars.
Within this astronomical growth, certain e-commerce trends stand out at this point and will, no doubt, keep changing in the next few years.
E-commerce merchants face an impossible dilemma: they want to grow their businesses, acquiring more customers and sales, but as soon as they succeed, everything falls apart. Business processes become overwhelmed and highly inefficient. More customers lead to more small and repetitive tasks that take time away from marketing and customer service.
This is where automation shows its value. Automation can take care of all the small stuff so merchants and their employees can take care of the important stuff.
More than half (61%) of companies worldwide use some kind of automation in their business processes. More businesses are expected to invest in automation in the near future. You’ll be hard pressed to find any successful eCommerce merchant who doesn’t define order fulfillment as a vital component of the customer experience.
For e-commerce businesses, automation can help with
Replatforming is becoming imperative for many online businesses. According to Deloitte’s 2022 Retail Industry Outlook survey, 67% of respondents said they are considering investing in a different e-commerce or online shopping platform.
This trend was confirmed by the Digital Commerce 360 report, according to which 18% of the 93 retailers and 61% of B2B e-commerce sellers surveyed said they plan to switch commerce platforms within the next year.
Online business owners are eager to migrate to modern e-commerce platforms that offer more functionality and the ability to scale. They are tired of ongoing issues with old and outdated platforms with their regular technical issues that harm conversion rates
E-commerce companies that want to move to a new platform to scale their business and stay competitive tend to use automated migration services (like Cart2Cart, for example).
Cart2Cart enables you to quickly switch between various shopping carts, making it easier, faster, and more accessible to everyone. As online shopping practices are becoming more and more popular, switching across shopping carts no longer needs to be a hassle.
The Cart2Cart migration service is all about automating the migration process. The only stuff you’re forced to do manually is registration, as well as specifying your site and its migration options. More specifically, it only takes five steps to have your site data exported to a new shopping cart:
In 2023, consumers want to shop safely and securely online. Consumers are very wary of compromised privacy and data breaches – according to an IBM report, 37% of consumers said they have changed brands to protect their privacy.
While customers demand more personalized experiences, it is not so important to them that they are willing to risk the security of their data for the privilege.
What customers want in 2023 is to have the option to opt out of sharing personal information, or to check out as a guest if they don’t want to share valuable personal information.
They also want the peace of mind that the online stores they shop at are fully secure with a custom SSL certificate. Website owners will be expected to take every precaution to ensure a safe shopping experience for customers.
Ironically, it’s the adoption of new technologies to create better customer experiences that are putting online stores in harm’s way. Adding new technologies and functionalities to websites and apps is an invitation to cyber attackers to look for possible weak points to exploit.
E-commerce retailers are obliged to provide top-level cybersecurity measures to protect their stores, their data, and their customer data.
In the case of Cart2Cart, it performs the migration using a separate secure Hetzner server, and the data is not stored after the migration has been finished.
Thus, with the utmost security and data privacy, Cart2Cart is definitely a safe, if not the safest way of store data migration between various shopping carts.
Social media is the new search engine for online sales. Consider that 95% of working-age internet users are also social media platform users. Many of them, in particular, Gen Z, use social media to research brands rather than search engines.
According to eMarketer, the multibillion-dollar retail social commerce industry in the US earned $26.97 billion in sales in 2020. eMarkerter predicts that this figure will more than double in 2023, with earnings of $56.17 billion.
Online businesses are expected to increase their social media marketing to drive sales. Consumers are also expecting a social media presence from brands.
The Harris Poll has found that after a positive experience with a brand on social media,
Smartphones are driving 50% of e-commerce sales. Online stores can no longer provide mobile responsive or mobile-friendly websites; they have to design online stores for mobile-first experiences.
We don’t mention mobile shopping because it’s a new trend; we mention it because most people use their mobile phones to find brands and products. And they want to shop from their phones when they find what they are looking for.
For perspective, take in these e-commerce statistics:
In spite of the prevalence of m-shopping, a frictionless mobile commerce experience is not yet universally available. E-commerce businesses need to develop streamlined checkout experiences and mobile-friendly payment options.
These are some of the more prominent e-commerce trends to expect in 2023. There are bound to be more new technologies and trends this year, so it’s prudent to monitor developments and consider which emerging solutions to implement closely.
If it all sounds too overwhelming, stick to the ones that will improve customer experience and service. After all, without satisfied customers, you won’t have a business at all.
