31 Oktober 2019
Top 3 e-commerce trends directly from London
The e-commerce industry is in a constant state of flux and the new black is rarely new for long. At one of Europe’s largest e-commerce conferences, ‘Ecommerce Expo 2019’, Hesehus was naturally among the more than 15,000 participants ready to absorb the latest trends and tendencies. We have boiled down the essence of the two inspiring days to the three absolute hottest trends which it would be an advantage for e-commerce companies to keep a sharp eye on.
The future of commerce is headless
With the rapid technological development and the online consumers’ constantly increasing expectations, the largest trend from London is not surprisingly headless commerce.
Headless commerce is not the latest concept in the e-commerce dictionary but nevertheless more relevant than ever before. Why headless commerce? Because it comprises e-commerce solutions where the customer-related part of the solution (the head) is 'disconnected' from the standard components (the body) which form the back-end platform. In other words – a solution build on a headless platform, like our e-commerce platform Bizzkit, is not locked by a predefined customer-related design and set of features which provide e-commerce companies with the flexibility and agility which is required to follow the development in the market.
In this way, you can integrate the latest technologies and satisfy the consumers’ expectations with innovative customer journeys. And this is without having to worry about problems in the back-end platform as in traditional platforms.
This means that headless commerce can minimise the hassle for e-commerce companies and your customers at the same time.
Design your own post checkout flow
Another of the large topics of conversation at the conference was of course personalisation – more precisely the discovery of new pastures within this field. When it comes to personalisation, much focus is often on the search and shopping situation in the customer journey but more retailers have now discovered the often overlooked step in the customer journey, post checkout which is from when an order has been placed to the customer has received his/her package.
In this step, the communication will typically transfer to the freight company but in pace with the technological development, e-commerce companies can now also customise their own post checkout flow and thus give the customers an extraordinary aha experience with the brand.
These flows can consist of everything from proactive shipping notifications which reduces the amount of “where is my package” requests to customer service to soft mails, e.g. with a weather forecast for the day when the package is ready to be picked up. With these little extra touch points between e-commerce companies and the customers, you can create the extraordinary brand experience which increases the customers’ connection to your brand and makes them want to revisit.
Go mobile first
with PWA
Mobile first is on the lips of most people and at the conference in London, it became obvious that one of the hottest technological trends within this field is progressive web apps (PWA).
In brief, PWA is the mobile display of a webshop which in many ways resembles and performs like the traditional native apps. But because the consumer accesses the shop directly from a browser, a webshop, which is built like a PWA, is far more accessible than a native app. It is also possible for the consumer to receive push notifications and download a desktop icon from where they can access the site without browser line which gives the nice native app feeling without all the hassle with heavy downloads and updates.
The PWA technology can also help to increase performance and load speed on webshops because necessary files and data are automatically stored in the memory of the mobile unit. And according to figures from Google’s report, ’The need for mobile speed’, load speed is crucial to the conversion since 53% of the online consumers will leave sites with a load time of more than three seconds.
This means that there is much value for e-commerce companies to be gained by thinking mobile first and increase the speed of your webshop and the PWA technology may be a possible approach.
Are you also interested in riding the e-commerce wave and continue to meet your customers’ expectations to the perfect customer journey? We would like to invite you for a cup of coffee or we can visit you for a non-binding talk about your options.
Contact Casper Bo Jørgensen, Customer Relations Manager, at: +45 23 30 79 56 or write to: cbj@hesehus.dk
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