Changing customer behaviors and evolving technologies significantly impact the ecommerce landscape. In such a situation, Samir Shah, co-founder and chief product officer, Boom & Bucket, discusses how ecommerce companies can leverage disruptive technologies to grow their business.
Questions like: ‘How much time does a potential buyer spend on a site before leaving?’ or ‘How much traffic is coming?’ and ‘Where does it come from?’ not only need to be answered but are problems that new technology can solve. From bounce rate — the number of users that look at one page and leave — to user engagement and abandonment online, understanding customer behavior and deploying the right tech is the way forward.
But 2023 presents businesses with a unique set of factors that play both in favor and against ecommerce platforms. On the one hand, consumer trends have shifted and become increasingly demanding, while on the other, new technologies are setting leaders apart from the pack.
Traffic Is Up, but Everything Else Is Down
Content Square’s 2023 Digital Experience BenchmarkOpens a new window report reveals that while overall traffic grew 4.53% in the past year, all other metrics are down. The bounce rate negatively increased by 1.8%, and page views per session are down by 2.3%. More importantly, the conversion rate, which measures the percentage of users that go through the customer journey and purchase a product, is down by 3.10%.
By 2023, people online only give a page, on average, 47 seconds of their time. Compared to previous years, website experiences are becoming increasingly short-lived. How can companies compete and thrive while consumers’ patience shrinks and every industry and business goes into digital sales?
See More: Innovating Retail Experiences with Augmented Reality and Edge Computing
Create Robust Online Brand Experiences and Leverage Disruptive Technologies
It’s important to understand that site users have a human emotional experience. It takes a significant amount of hard work to make a user feel engaged, and a simple mistake can easily frustrate them.
Companies that present highly interactive modern content reap the benefits of higher conversion rates. But focusing on strengthening the positive by itself will not do the trick. Reducing friction and user frustration is also vital.
When a web page takes more than one second to load, it risks losing potential clients dramatically. And frustration is common among users; according to Content Square, one in three visitors experience it. The solution? Reliable, powerful, and efficient host cloud providers.
Cloud providers are essential to creating fast-loading, responsive, secure, and robust online brand experiences for customers. They can also help enterprises track, identify, and analyze website metrics to increase engagement and reduce frustration.
But the work does not end there. Ecommerce leaders are also leveraging new disruptive technologies to respond to the pressures of showcasing products and services online in a way that drives sales. Virtual tours, augmented and virtual reality, metaverse sales, cloud analytics platforms, and AI-powered recommendations drive ecommerce to the next level. Here are a few technologies companies can use.
1. AI-Product Recommendations
One of the most cost-effective technologies in ecommerce is AI-product recommendations. A few top cloud and SaaS vendors offer solutions like Google Cloud Recommendations AI, Algolia Recommend, Microsoft Azure Recommendations, and IBM Watson AI, among others.
Cloud vendors have become leaders in this technology, allowing developers to deploy AI recommendations at competitive prices. These applications are state-of-the-art machine learning models that can correct for bias and seasonality. They are designed to maximize the value of a company’s data, can be deployed at any touchpoint, customized for different strategies, and scale globally, ensuring compliance. Â
AI recommendations-as-a-service technology has made it easy for ecommerce companies to surface the most relevant inventory. They also enable companies to constantly adapt, update inventory to improve conversion, and increase cross-selling.
2. LiDAR and 3D
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is another technology that has played a vital role in keeping users engaged by creating impactful 3D objects, spaces, and products. LiDAR has come a long way. The technology has moved from being an expensive experimental tech to becoming accessible, affordable, and easy to use.
LiDAR became mainstream when companies like Apple equipped the 2020 iPad Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro with a LiDAR scanner. Other companies like Nvidia, a leader in cutting-edge graphic processing, have developed Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) applications that can turn any 2D photo into a 3D scene using AI.
For example, real estate and construction companies are using LiDAR to create 3D scans of spaces and objects, which can then be used to create virtual walkthroughs of spaces. In contrast, retail, automotive, and manufacturing leverage technology to create highly interactive product models with which prospective customers can engage. These 3D objects are highly interactive, enabling customers advanced visualization, customization, and different views.
 These 3D models can also be linked with product meta-data to create clickable hotspots for customers to access critical information on important features seamlessly.
See More: Four Ways to Accurately and Seamlessly Share E-commerce Supply Chain Data
Buyers Want It; Sellers Need It
Augmented and virtual reality online experiences are also rising and are used to increaseÂ
engagement. Known as metaverse experiences, they can be combined with social media to create omnichannel brand experiences.
Showpad, a leading sales enablement platform working with customers like Coca-Cola European Partners, Thales, BNP Paribas, GE Healthcare, Xerox, Fujifilm, and others, assures that metaverse sales are already a reality.
A recent Showpad survey found that 86% of buyers prefer to be sold virtuallyOpens a new window . And the trend is only increasing as new generations increase their buying power, with 96% of Millennial and Gen Z buyers choosing metaverse style purchases.
As traditional selling becomes a thing of the past, companies are forced to reimagine their operations. Showpad found that of those responsible for more than $12 million in purchases a year for their business, 69% say there is no more need for the traditional ‘face-to-face’ sales meeting. More than half (59%) have purchased their business after receiving a presentation or demo in the Metaverse or containing augmented reality.
Staying Ahead of the CurveÂ
Metaverse online platforms, with impressive design, graphs, images, and technology combined with social media platforms, play a crucial role in online sales.
How the best sellers respond to modern customer trends is a holistic strategy that combines metrics, data analytics and AI, digital transformation tools, cloud platforms, omnichannel experiences, social media, and new technologies.
In this rapidly paced interconnected world, where customer journeys are extremely short-lived and going down year after year, 47 seconds can be more than enough for companies that stay ahead of the curve.
Which new age technology are you using to attract and sell your brand online? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!Â
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