The future of E-commerce

E-commerce – by definition, it means buying and selling products or services over the internet- it’s something we participate in on a daily basis, we spend hours browsing for products online, or we use it to pay our bills.

1995 was the year when it all began for the largest online retailer in the world – Amazon. It first launched as an online bookstore. At the time, brick and mortar bookstores were limited to about 200.000 titles, whereas Amazon, being an online-only store – without physical limitations – was able to offer millions of titles for the shoppers. Another major success story of the dot com bubble was eBay, an online auction site that debuted in 1995.  Back then, these platforms were not as well-known as they are today, only a small percentage of the population that had access to the internet was using them to do their online shopping.

Nowadays we can’t imagine a life without E-commerce – it would be complicated and inconvenient for too many people – but we should not forget that it only appeared a couple of decades ago and ever since it has been helping countless businesses grow with the help of new technologies, improvements in internet connectivity, and widespread consumer and business adoption.

The retail world is undergoing drastic changes, with most of the influencing features being rapid technology development and recent trends. Current retail trends show that 51% of Americans prefer online shopping, with e-commerce growing 23% year-over-year. E-commerce is expected to change at an even faster rate as brands embrace the power of voice search and omni-platform/omni-device options. Voice assistants are already being used to make purchases by 40% of millennials, with that number expected to exceed 50% by 2020. This transformation of the digital retail landscape will only continue to grow as more consumers integrate digital devices into their shopping habits.

This means that online retailers will diminish the need for offline stores, making brick and mortar shops obsolete. It is estimated that in upcoming years people will doubt your existence if you don’t have an online portal.  Even today’s offline stores are building up their online presence and they usually have more products available on their online shops than in the physical stores.

With rapid developments in mobile technology, the internet is becoming more realistic and simplistic, buyers are becoming more and more impulsive thanks to the increased level of trust, encouraged by social media, significantly increasing their intention to buy.

All in all, it looks like the future of e-commerce is a bright one, researchers predict that by 2022 e-commerce sales are expected to reach 700 billion in the US alone. Experts also predict that, soon, most e-commerce interactions will be an omnichannel experience for shoppers, as buying experiences will be ultra-personalized thanks to the implementation of AI,  and customers will expect to be able to research, browse, shop, and purchase seamlessly between different devices and on different platforms (like a standalone web store, an Amazon presence, etc.)

Over the years we have helped hundreds of customers to sell online by building different e-commerce websites on different platforms, we’ve seen businesses grow and flourish, from eBay stores to Magento websites, Shopify to BigCommerce websites we’ve built it all with our in-house team of developers and designers.

If you are looking for the tailor-made solution for you, don’t hesitate to contact us on 0121 285 1050 or you can find more information on our website here.