17 Top Trends – Future of E-commerce [2024]

Growing an online business was never easy. With such cutthroat competition in the scene, it is even harder. As an E-commerce store owner, surely you’ll have hundreds of things to do but only so much time and money for all the implementations and improvements. Instead of tapping each and every big and small aspect of the list, why not just work on those fields that matter the most, especially now in 2024!

There’s no choice for the store owners than to stay updated in online business. You are nowhere to be seen if you are still following the traditional methods of payments, SEO, or delivery. Each and every step of the customer journey is revamped with the latest tool and technology.

So, it is important to stay updated with the top trends of E-commerce in 2024. To stop your customers from bouncing back to your competitors’ stores and also to keep them coming back for more, follow these points to make your store E-commerce 2024 ready!

Top Trends for E-commerce 2024:

1. Personalization
2. Voice Search
3. Artificial Intelligence
4. Shipping Innovations
5. Progressive Web Applications
6. Animations
7. Headless eCommerce
8. Chatbots
9. VR and AR
10. Easy checkout
11. Re-commerce
12. AMP for emails
13. Automation
14. Social commerce
15. Trust & privacy
16. IoT commerce
17. Marketplace

Before going in-depth of the above most useful E-commerce trends for 2024, I’d like to mention the must-have necessary points in your store to stand the competition:

1. Creative/High-quality content
2. Brand identity
3. Best user experience
4. Mobile-Friendly Website.
5. High-quality images & videos

Once you are stable in the online market with these essential traits, go for the E-commerce trends you’ll see in 2024 to stand apart from the competition:

Future of E-commerce in 2024:

Personalization

“I’m most passionate about personalization. I firmly believe that personalized experiences with brands will most drive loyalty and relevance for customers in the future.” – Katrina Lake, Founder, CEO Stitch Fix

Brands like Nike, Nutella, Spotify have leveraged personalization for customer engagement and conversion.

I’ve earlier posted the benefits of E-commerce product customization and personalization. And, there are many more on that list. The below stats are enough to lay importance of personalization:

• 49% of consumers say that they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular company. (Segment)
• 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience. (Forrester)

There will be an increase in personalization and customization which will benefit the business to get more data about the customers and increase engagement using the acquired data.

Voice Search

Voice search is the new organic search!

Voice search is a technology that allows users to perform a search on the internet by verbally asking a question on a smartphone, smart device, or computer device.

Voice assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortona are becoming popular. The importance of voice search and voice-enabled devices can be proved with the below statistics:

• Voice shopping is expected to jump to $40 billion in 2022
• Smart Speaker Market size is set to exceed USD 30 billion by 2024
• 34% of people who do not own a voice assistant are interested in purchasing one.

2024 is expected to be the year of voice search. Voice search will make it easier for the users than to type. You can go shopping while doing your household chores! E-commerce stores will have to optimize their store and marketing strategy to be on one page with this transition.

It is surely an industry-changing scenario that would create a completely transitioned market.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the machine’s ability to learn and imitate human beings. When we talk about E-commerce trends in 2024, it is not affordable to not discuss artificial intelligence and how it impacts online shopping behavior in 2024. AI taps the topics in E-commerce like product recommendation, voice search, personalization, fraud detection, price optimization, virtual chatbot assistant, image search, and customer segmentation.

AI is surely going to reach every nook and corner of E-commerce apart from the mentioned above due to its extraordinary capabilities,

The chatbot market size is expected to surpass the $1.25 billion milestone by 2025.

Chatbots are in trend now due to hype in messaging apps. Not only that, but it has also become much of a necessity in many industries. The customers demand 24*7 support, be it health, finance, or banking. This leads the organization to develop AI-powered chatbots to attend to customer queries around the clock.

Personalization can be implemented effectively with AI in the picture. It drives enhanced customer engagement and high conversion. The blend of personalization and AI can help customize the product recommendations, search, landing page, offers, etc. based on the user activity. Furthermore, AI can also help in reducing the mundane tasks. For example, ChatGPT can perform basic tasks like writing. Tools such as Magento 2 AI Content Generator can be helpful to the merchants for creating content through AI.

AI has much more potential than just chatbot or personalization. Hence, preparing your E-commerce stores with the latest technology cannot be ignored!

Shipping Innovations

Customers now expect speedy delivery from their favorite stores. E-commerce store owners need to invest in the shipping system, especially during the holiday seasons.

The concept of same-day delivery helps boost the sales, average cart value, and hence the conversion rates!

The future of E-commerce 2024 will witness robots delivering the products! Imagine your product at your doorstep without any delivery person! That’s the power of data-driven innovation and AI’s potential.

PWA is Your Smart Move

It is safe to consider PWA as the next evolution in M-commerce in 2024.

Allow customers to seamlessly browse through your site, whenever they want and however they want. Deliver a better experience for users on the web. Use the advanced web capabilities and deliver an amazing app-like experience to your potential customers.

Check these PWA stats that show why is it going to be trending:

• Pinterest rebuilt their mobile site as a PWA and core engagements increase by 60%
• Starbucks witnessed an increase of 2x in the daily number of active users.
• Tinder cuts the loading time from 11.91 seconds to 4.69 seconds
• Treebo launched a PWA and saw a 4x  increase in conversion rate year-over-year.

If you are one of those store owners who worry about page speed and conversion, PWA is your next 2024 mission!

Animate, Animate, Animate

via GIPHY

The animation gives a cool user experience and is eye-pleasing for the customers.

As humans are inherently visual creatures, capturing the animation message is more effective. Using this fact as a selling tool is wise! With upcoming technology and tools to create attractive animations which are small in size, you can benefit in the following ways:

• improve user experience
• make things easy to find on a page
• Divert customers to offers
• Easy navigation
• Engaging & interesting design

An image is good. Moving image – even better!

Headless eCommerce

Headless commerce is a CMS system that manages and delivers content without a frontend delivery layer. Amazon is the best example to show how headless commerce benefitted conversion. Amazon Echo and Dash ordering implementation make Amazon the leader in headless commerce.

Dash Button orders increased by 70 percent in the past year and now occur twice per minute.

Headless commerce’s benefits make it the choice of merchants in 2024:

• Frontend Development
  • Simple API Call
  • No design constraint
  • Building the frontend presentation from scratch
• Customization & Personalization
  • Ability to create your own experience for admin and users
• Flexibility & Adaptability
  • Unlimited customization
  • Ability to make the changes in the frontend

Conversational Chatbots

Brands like Sephora, Starbucks, Duolingo, Domino’s, and many more have adopted chatbots to benefit their business. These brands are keen to adopt the technologies that can push the customer conversion ahead and chatbots are their first choice!

The size of the chatbot market is forecast to reach around 1.25 billion U.S. dollars in 2025, a great increase from the market size in 2016, which stood at 190.8 million U.S. dollars. – Statista

A chatbot is an AI software that can conduct a conversation in natural language via audio or text.

Leveraging it for E-commerce is the best way to adopt the latest technology. If a question arises that do customers really want to talk with bots, then David from Mobile Monkey has the answer for it, “Customers want fast answers more than anything!” Agreed.

So, chatbots are here to stay!

VR and AR

Wikipedia defines these terms as,

“Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.”

“Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.”

In simpler terms, AR is the combination of the real and virtual worlds. And, VR is an artificial world created with software to give an illusion to the user that it is the real world!

According to Gartner, by 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in AR online and in-store. Sephora is the pioneer of AR commerce that allows potential buyers to try different beauty products virtually before buying them, that too, in the comfort of their home!

These technologies allow the brands to visually convince the visitors about the quality of the product! Why not leverage them now to boost your business!

Easier Checkout

Amazon is popular for many reasons and one of them is easy checkout. It saves the customers’ data in their accounts and saves them from manual data entry each time they shop. Imagine how annoying it would be if you had to enter your name and address every time, and even more if you had to do it on your smartphone!

Saving the checkout and billing time contributes to improving the customers’ shopping experience. Offering frictionless checkout to customers of 2024 is mandatory.

23% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a “too long/complicated checkout process”. – Baymard

And, if stores focus on checkout improvements, 35.26% increase in conversion rate can be witnessed. In other words, $260 billion worth of lost orders can be recovered with easier checkout!

Optimize the online store’s checkout process to reduce as many of those cart abandonments as possible. You can use checkout extensions for your store to make the process easier!

The Rise of Re-commerce

“There are numerous reasons for the recent rise of resale, including environmental benefits and the desire for frequent turnover of wardrobes especially among the Instagram generation.”

The Re-commerce market is gaining popularity with consumer awareness about environmental sustainability! Check the below stats:

• 64% of Women Bought or Are Now Willing to Buy Secondhand Products
• 26% of luxury shoppers also buy secondhand.
• 25% of department store shoppers also buy secondhand.

I can go on and on but what I’m trying to impose is that the E-commerce stores can explore the opportunity of Re-commerce. The environmentally friendly brands that focus on environmental sustainability are preferred by shoppers now than ever.

68% of US internet users deemed product sustainability an important factor in making a purchase, says Rahul Chadha from Emarketer

As an E-commerce store owner, talk about environmental sustainability on your website, explain how your products support it, your environmental footprints, consider your packaging material, etc.

AMP for Emails

Google announced Amp for Email at Google’s AMP event in Amsterdam.

The dynamic Email content is now possible, making it interactive in the inbox. Deliver the latest information to your subscribers. for example, the latest comment threads or job openings, etc.

This list can’t be complete without AMP for Emails as it is going to be present everywhere now in 2024, be it real-time order status update, promoting products, reduce abandoned cart, gathering product reviews, submit forms, etc.

Accelerated mobile pages allow bringing mobile sites to Email, with updated content, and the shoppers can shop without even visiting the site!

Automate, Automate, Automate

E-commerce automation includes marketing automation, chatbots, order delivery, and much more.

E-commerce automation makes it possible to save time, money, and energy that can be allotted to tasks of more importance such as experimenting, creativity, personal development, business development, and marketing.

Consistency, accuracy, and professionalism are the added benefits of automating things in the business.

Social Commerce

Social commerce is selling your products directly from your social media.

For example, the Facebook shop allows businesses to sell their products. Magento 2 stores can use the Magento 2 Facebook Store Integration for the same!

We know that brands like Coca-cola, and Starbucks extensively using social media for business have cracked the code of social commerce!

People are going online and where are they going the most?

Check these statistics that say social commerce is going to be a thing in 2023 for online businesses:

• The number of active social media users worldwide was expected to surpass 4.7 billion in 2022. Two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to come online by 2023. – Social Media Statistics
• The social media users worldwide is a number projected to increase to almost 3.1 billion in 2021. – Statista

Let these stats sink in for a second!

Social referral to retail eCommerce sites has grown 110% in two years, outpacing all other referral channels. And these numbers are nowhere to go, but the only spike, which is why businesses are bound to focus on their social media presence in the coming years.

Trust & Privacy

E-commerce businesses that offer personalization must not fall short when it comes to the privacy of the customers’ data. In 2024, personalization has caught rapid popularity and is in demand, however, customers also expect privacy of their data.

Online businesses will have to learn how to balance the demand for personalization with the privacy factor.

With the privacy regulations and consumer protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA, trust and privacy are going to be critical in 2024.

Iot Commerce

Internet of things has brought an evolution in many sections of E-commerce. Be it sales, marketing, order management & fulfillment (Eg: Dash Button), warehouse, or customer experience!

Purchases made using appliances, voice devices, etc. are going to be trendy in 2024.

According to Statista,

“The technology reached 100 billion dollars in market revenue for the first time in 2017, and forecasts suggest that this figure will grow to around 1.6 trillion by 2025.”

With the internet of things in E-commerce, the coming years will give the merchants an opportunity to connect with their shoppers where they are more inclined to buy and make a conversion.

Marketplaces

Consumers are now shopping at more than one place. It will compel the store owners to start exploring multiple sales platforms such as social media, marketplaces, and other sites.

Multi-channel retailers that implement an effective diversification strategy will not only maximize their reach but also witness increasing sales opportunities.

Opting for offering products on reputed marketplaces have their own pros such as:

• opportunity to build a brand among diverse audiences
• trustworthy customer reviews that can be used for promotions
• leverage the reputation of the platform

Marketplace sites like those operated by Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay accounted for more than 50% of global web sales in 2018. – Oberlo

Owing to these facts and figures, marketplaces are expected to be a hit in the future.

Also, apart from marketplaces, explore the untapped market of social media such as Instagram if your target audience is from the age group of 20 to 35 years. For Magento 2 store owners, the easy way to leverage Instagram for business is by installing the Magento 2 Instagram extension that integrates Instagram with Magento 2 store to fetch Instagram images in the stores to create a beautiful Insta shop.

That was for the top trends in 2024 for E-commerce!

So which one was for you?

Do let me know in the Comments section below 🙂

I’d like to know your thoughts on the topic.

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Thank you.