Ecommerce trends have been improving over the years to enhance customer experience. Learn about four highly effective trends in the dynamic ecommerce space.
Gone are the days when customers had a limited choice of where to shop. Today, there are hundreds if not thousands of ecommerce stories in every niche, making it possible for customers to choose flexibly.
With the increase in flexibility of choice, customer expectations are also changing. Now, they can decide who to shop from. Plus, they can simply head over to a new business if they do not like the service a merchant or company provides.
Therefore, ecommerce businesses have to amp up their customer service to ensure they do not give the consumers a reason to leave. Here are four ecommerce trends for 2022 that will help improve customer experience.
Discovery Commerce
Discovery commerce is an ecommerce strategy in which a business guides a customer towards their product. To completely understand how discovery commerce works, it’s important to be familiar with discovery shopping.
Discovery shopping refers to the act of browsing through the web without looking for a specific product.
Furthermore, they also have no intention of buying a product but are open to the idea of discovering new products.
People love discovering something new they are attracted to, to purchase. They may have seen the product a while ago and forgotten about it completely. Or, they may have discovered something they were hoping to purchase but did not have any specific requirements in mind.
According to a Facebook survey, 63% of shoppers around the world enjoyed discovering products that they were not actively looking for. Discovery commerce can be beneficial to businesses at certain times of the year, such as the holiday season or near back-to-school months.
Discovery commerce helps businesses in the following ways:
- Increased Customer Base: If a random visitor found your product attractive, they may become loyal customers and come back for another purchase later.
- Catalog Evaluation: You can track the searches made by visitors to determine which items people showed more interest in. Then, you can increase these items in your inventory.
Supplier Diversification
The pandemic disrupted supply chains globally. Due to this, many businesses suffered because they were not prepared for these unprecedented conditions. However, experts believe that these disruptions will end by 2022.
Even with the pandemic out of the way, there is no way to completely avoid delays. Weather conditions and political instability are some of the few things that can impact logistics and the supply of consumer goods.
One way to make yourself less vulnerable to these delays is to diversify your supplier network. Diversification helps protect you from delays and disruptions in the supply chain. But before you hop on to this trend, you need to do some research.
Look for the cheapest logistics options you can find without compromising on reliability. Then, compare the costs. Which is more expensive; the aftereffects of disruption caused due to a one-supplier supply chain or sourcing consumer goods from multiple suppliers?
According to the Supplier Diversity Study by the Hackett Group, companies that put 20% of their budget into supplier diversification can attribute up to 15% of their annual revenue generation to supplier diversity programs.
Previous studies in this regard have found the return on investment from supplier diversity programs to be up to 133%.
Local Delivery
Traditional parcel carriers have seen a surge in the volume of parcels since 2020 began. The spike is expected to last through the following years too. During the pandemic, consumers put up with slow shipments because they did not have a choice.
But now that deliveries have resumed as normal, consumers expect fast shipments, sometimes as early as the same or next day.
Amazon has been providing this service to its Prime members. Now, customers expect all businesses to offer speedy shipments.
To provide this service to your customers, you have to ensure that your inventory is decentralized. All items you stock should be as close as possible to the end consumer. The goods should be stocked sufficiently and must be organized in an orderly manner.
As a small or medium-sized business, you may not have the organizational infrastructure for this. Thus, you will have to bring in a fulfillment partner that offers inventory management systems and an advanced warehouse.
In this way, you will be able to meet your logistics needs and improve the customer experience.
Enhanced Reverse Logistics Management
As per the National Retail Federation report, online retail returns doubled in 2020. When customers make online purchases, they do so with the expectation that they will be able to return the product in accordance with the company’s return policy.
Therefore, businesses need to have a robust system in place to deal with returns. How you deal with returns as a business determines the loyalty of your customers.
Here are some ways in which businesses are dealing with the rising number of returns:
- Hiring more people to deal with returns
- Increasing their warehouse space
- Creating a specific department to deal with returns
You need to ensure that return items are handled properly. Otherwise, there is a risk of inventory losses. Moreover, you must cater to the customer immediately with refunds or replacements, whichever you offer.
Being a part of retail ecommerce, you should be ready to deal with a certain number of return orders. The ideal way to prevent loss is to minimize the number of returns. You can do this by optimizing your shipping and packaging process.
Plus, make sure that the product descriptions and images match the actual item. Hire professionals to take pictures and make videos of your product for the website.
In this way, you can minimize returns since customers will get exactly what they were expecting after going through your website.
Wrapping Things Up
It’s certainly difficult for smaller businesses to have the same degree of product selection and customer service compared to bigger fish like Amazon. However, you can keep in mind how customers continually adapt to online shopping. Small businesses can implement cutting-edge ecommerce strategies to improve customer experience and increase revenue generation.
With the right concoction of software, logistics strategy, products, and data, you can make a huge difference in the way customers view your e-commerce business.
