Incoming e-commerce trends in 2017 - our predictions

1.        Automated Chat Bots

Your customers are busy, they don’t have time to wait until you will response for their enquiry. With growing popularity of mobile devices – almost 80% of customers in online stores are browsing them also using smartphones and 47% of them also have tablets. Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Google – the most popular messaging applications are all introducing automated chat bots to help your customers with shopping, booking and also with customer services.

Considering the Facebook, it actually has above 11,000 available independent chat bots.

2.        Mobile Power

It’s boring. Each year each article says – mobile is the king, mobile will be the king. But it’s true. From one year to another the number of mobile devices users arrive. The main reason is convenience. Smartphones are getting cheaper and bigger, more people can afford it and more people prefer to look on interesting them things during walk, bus drive rather than siting and pulling out laptop.

In 2016 mobile traffic overtaken desktop traffic on the web. Furthermore Google is changing way of indexing websites in search results. They are working on new, mobile-first web index, which they describe it on their blog. Main change is that mobile friendly websites will appear higher than only desktop – not optimized for mobile websites.

3.        Artificial Intelligence

Many customers will exptect contact with their personal, fast and available immediately assistant. Main reason is the habit to smartphones features like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa (on the Echo). Each assistant will work differently.

Managers of e-commerce stores must keep an eye on how this tools are changing the buyers journey and decide to use it to improve customer services to overtake competition. Nowadays, they must think outside the box to beat the competition with functional ideas.

4.        Same Day Delivery

Considering the report conducted by Forrester, the majority of consumers surveyed expressed willingness to pay additional fee if the effect would be to receive ordered products on the same day.  

The forerunner of this trend was Amazon Prime, but flexibility of delivery options (in which is included same day delivery) will increase in importance as an e-commerce differentiator.

This area of e-commerce has always been problematic, but with each month industry make steps which are solving that problems.

5.        Personalization

GrandNode – Recommended Products. This is one of the best features to use in incoming 2017 year. The enormity of the data that customers can see by going to your store, can successfuly discourage them from any shopping. This is reason why it’s so important to filter the products and categories and show them only that which they want to see.

While your store will collecting data about your customers preferences, you can use GrandNode features to analyze and segment them. Then you will be able to easily show perfectly suited and personalized offers.

6.        Automation

Real Time Marketing and Big Data are getting stronger and more powerful. Many companies are investing in marketing automation. And this is clue to the success in 2017 year.

Many processes can be automated, many of them, should be made immediately after specified customer actions. This can be achieved only with marketing automation tools. What kind of action we can include to this point? For example sending e-mails to customers who have abandoned cart in your store, customers who have unpaid orders in your store.

 Get familiar with our new, irreplaceable features. Future comes with GrandNode. You can download and test our free, open source, fast e-commerce software based on NoSQL - MongoDB database withour any costs here:

https://grandnode.com/downloads