How Advanced Technologies Reshape E-commerce Business

E-commerce has surely been the greatest by-product of the Internet Revolution. It has reshaped the idea of how products and services are sold and how businesses reach out to their potential customers. From online payments to 360-degree images, it ushered in several technological innovations in the digital world, and the evolution continues as advancements in the field of Information Technology have a direct bearing on e-commerce. So what are the new technologies that are becoming enablers for e-commerce? How will these technologies impact your e-commerce business in the future? Let’s find out.

Absence of real store like experience and having to choose a product by only looking at the image used to be one of the major criticisms of online shopping. The argument did have merit, but with AR or Augmented Reality, you will be able to create a brick and mortar store like experience on your online store. From clothes to furniture potential customers get a better perspective of what they are going to buy when they use AR gadgets to view these products. With the prices of AR gadgets going down significantly this technology are expected to become a market differentiator in the coming years. Future stores won’t survive without AR feature.

Where is my piece of jewelry coming from? Does the manufacturer whose products I choose adhere to labor laws? Such queries shouldn’t be dismissed as on-off user queries. Globally, customers are becoming more conscious about what they buy and where they are buying it from. Hence they need more information about the products they are chasing. This is where blockchain comes into the picture. What this technology does is put more information in the hands of the customers much beyond the regular specs and feature information you have on your store for the products.

In an ideal world, most customers would prefer to check out in a single easy step and not waste time going through a lengthy checkout process. Amazon had a monopoly over 1-click checkout for many years as it owned the patent to this idea. But that patent period is over and every e-commerce development tool has come up with a proprietary version of this easy checkout process. Online shopping becomes part of daily lives by implementing this technology you will be able to bring down the rate of shopping cart abandonment and more importantly allow your returning customers to repeat the same order without having to go through the process again.

Voice-based searches are no longer an exception in the world of e-commerce. You have already seen the popularity of Alexa or Apple’s Siri and even Google has been improving voice search functionality on its devices. What this means is that going forward more people would be searching for products using voice search instead of using their keyboards and keypads. Voice search has been popular on mobile devices for quite some time and modern desktop browsers also support them. Online stores that are voice-search friendly are finding more traction in the market and garnering better sales.

At the backend of your operations, you have a customer service team resolving queries and offering advice over phone, chat, and email. But as your business grows you see how these resources are stretched. The problem multiplies as customers expect instant answers to their queries and don’t like waiting to be answered. This is where Chatbots are acting as a force multiplier for your customer service team. They act as your front desk and answer the basic queries and doubts that customers thus relieving some of the burdens for your customer service team helping them improve their performance.

The bottom line — e-commerce business has been one of the best test benches for every major development in the world of technology. The e-commerce ecosystem has constantly embraced new technological advancements in a bid to increase profits, cut down operational costs and most importantly improve the experience for end users. As an e-commerce store owner, you need to implement these advanced technologies into your store to reap maximum benefits.

In this write-up, we looked at some of the ways in which advanced technologies are reshaping the e-commerce business and why you should embrace these technologies.