Each year comes with its own set of predictions for every industry. Similarly, 2016 had a host of predictions about ecommerce growth and how online shopping trends will shape up throughout the year.
The year 2016 was a defining year for eCommerce and online shopping trends clearly indicate ecommerce will continue to grow bigger each year. The festive season sales across the globe set new records and gave a reason to cheer for the entrepreneurs, sellers, customers and all others involved in the ecommerce trade.
The trends that emerged from the year round sales on various online retail stores as well as marketplaces clearly indicated that ecommerce has evolved. To keep up with the demands of the buyers, retailers need to refine their strategies and invest not only in marketing and promotional offerings but also come up with better shopping experience for their customers.
Table of Contents
Let us review some of the defining ecommerce industry trends that have reshaped the way we had been perceiving online commerce before 2016;
Mobile Commerce is here to Stay
Mobile commerce was the force to reckon within 2016. The forecasts were predicting an upsurge in mobile traffic and the unprecedented success of mobile channel sales during the year cemented this fact.
Online marketplaces saw massive mobile channel sales and for many up to 80% of their sales were coming through the mobile traffic visiting their portal. Also, along with the mobile presence, mobile responsive site design also gained prominence as online shoppers are not ready to compromise on the look and feel while shopping on different screen sizes.
StoreHippo team has always worked to find future ready solutions and we have been the pioneers in developing a mobile ready ecommerce platform that makes it possible for entrepreneurs to have a mobile site at no additional cost.
Need For Speed
Site speed and performance are the two factors that ensure the success or failure of your online selling store. A faster loading site is not only ensures better traffic and conversions it also helps you get better SERP ranking on Google and other major search engines.
The need for faster and better performing site across various devices has been highlighted by customer behaviour patterns throughout the year 2016. Amazon had reported earlier that that every 100ms of latency made them lose 1% of sales. Reducing page load time by even a slight margin can add significantly to your sales volume.
StoreHippo has always been focussing on this very important aspect of success for online stores websites and offered solutions like SPA(Single Page Architecture) which significantly reduce page switch and load times thus reducing cart abandonment and boosting sales.
Customers adore Free Shipping
We all love freebies but the KING amongst all free offerings is FREE Shipping. Although customers showed a preference for paid services for faster and better shipping , free shipping still remains a big lure for online buyers.
In a survey, 88% respondents suggested that they would defer shopping and wait for a free shipping offer. StoreHippo experts have always recommended Free Shipping as the most effective tool for getting better ROI from marketing campaigns. Our pre integrated shipping services give an option to our clients to explore various delivery channels for their online retail store and offer faster, better or free shipping to their clients.
Product recommendations and Personalization
If you have not been using this on your website yet, you are definitely losing valuable sales. Online surveys have clearly indicated that customers can be pushed towards buying by sending personalised product recommendations.
Giving a personal touch to customer purchases based on their buying and surfing behaviour helped many new online stores on StoreHippo platform boost their sales and revenue. With the use of various PUSH notifications and easy analytics tools StoreHippo has helped the stores on our platform to gain an edge over their competitors by matching pace with the most happening trend of 2016.
Make Shopping Easier
The new age buyer on online shopping site is not willing to spend more than a few minutes searching for desired products or services. In 2016, a large number of customers said that they would opt out from buying on a site that did not offer easy search and multi tier category distribution for the products.
Our ecommerce platform has taken note of this trend and offers multi category product management along with faceted search for higher engagement and conversion of orders on all the stores powered by StoreHippo.
Conclusion
Have you adopted any of these trends in 2016 to boost the visibility and revenue of your online retail store? If not, it's high time you caught up with these trends and moved forward in your e commerce journey in the coming year 2017.
Keep reading our blog section for upcoming trends in ecommerce industry for the year 2017 and learn how to get higher ROI from your online business.
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