The e-commerce marketplace is growing tremendously with new technology trends emerging at every step. Each problem you faced a year back now has high-end technical solutions right in front of you.
The e-commerce market is expected to reach USD 10.19 Tn in 2025 and will continuously grow at a CAGR of 15.8% during the forecast period of 2025-2030. E-commerce will progress significantly. In this progress, the role of new technologies is quite important, as they will help the industry flourish.
Through this blog, we will discuss futuristic technologies in the E-commerce industry and how these technologies will help overcome the current challenges.
Why is the number of eCommerce Businesses Increasing?
The way people shop online has changed a lot because of COVID. Earlier small businesses faced several issues in starting online stores. However, with more and more people shopping online, small businesses have set their footprint in e-commerce businesses.
In the US, there was a 330% rise in online shoppers, signaling a shift in consumer behavior. 90% of customers expect brands to offer a seamless shopping experience across both online and in-store channels.
The fact is, the challenges in bringing your retail business online persist. A lot of hurdles come in a business way. The good news is with the rapid technological advancement ecommerce websites are all buckled up to resolve all difficulties.
Challenges and Futuristic Solutions
Emergence of multiple sectors
There is an E-commerce platform in almost every niche. Some are specific to a particular sector while others scale up by targeting multiple sectors. For example, Amazon started as an e-commerce book store, but as you know now, you will find everything on Amazon.
It leads to an increase in categories and the number of products on online platforms. The problem e-commerce businesses face while scaling up is the difficulty of managing and organizing the growing number of categories and products efficiently. This includes product categorization, product discoverability, and inventory management.
Technology Trends:
This emergence of multiple sectors on E-commerce platforms has also introduced several technologies like production information management systems through which the business can track all the marketing tools and contents that are available in the store. Also, this technology enables the distribution of product information on several platforms to advertise networks and marketplaces.
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David Zimmerman, Director of eCommerce Solutions, Kensium mentions that “more involvement of voice-enabled solutions in the commerce space with Amazon Alexa and Google Home have opened up a huge opportunity for businesses.”
Apart from that ecommerce platforms are expected to opt for cloud-based solutions which provide scalability and flexibility to handle increased data storage and processing needs as the product catalog expands.
Customer Verification
In e-commerce platforms, it is quite common for people to use different names and identities to purchase products. It’s quite challenging for e-commerce owners to know if the person is fake, or real or whether they are dealing with bots. Some of the most common fraudulent activities that verify the authenticity of customers include account takeovers, fake accounts, bot attacks, automated fraud, etc.
Technology Trends:
Image Source: Freepik
The ultimate solution to this challenge is strict online identity verification. Some of the futuristic technologies that will accurately prevent fraud include automated decisions with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and implementing step-up authentication according to the risk profile.
Although the majority of organizations use self-service procedures, they should work on alternate authentication techniques. This is also suggested as a best practice by the National Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence (NCCoE). It recommends that online merchants use web analytics to implement multi-factor authentication and that contextual risk is essential to lowering fraudulent online identity and authentication.
Overselling Product
Overselling refers to that phase where customers order a product but you don’t have that item in stock. Even if the item isn’t available in-store, it might show as “in stock” on the website. Sadly, this means you have to cancel the order deteriorating the user experience on your website. This situation especially occurs when e-commerce platforms put on sale or offers.
Solution:
By managing to oversell, you will not only prevent customers from having a poor experience but also redirect their attention to other products that are actually in stock. This offers an opportunity for higher revenue.
In 2025, e-commerce websites are planning to focus more on mobile commerce and optimize inventory restocking. Not only that, in the future almost every ecommerce website will have ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems in place. Furthermore, they will be investing in demand forecasting.
Improvement of customer experience
If there’s one thing that weighs higher than your product, it features your USP is the customer’s experience on your e-commerce platform. It determines whether or not users will return to your website. The major expectation of every customer is to get a kind of similar experience as they get in offline stores so that they do not have to make much effort.
Technology Trends:
The interface of your e-commerce business significantly impacts user experience. In 2025, e-commerce websites and apps would prefer simple and clean interfaces that focus on functionality and product presentation.
Technologies such as PWA(Progressive Web Apps) will help businesses develop websites that give an app-like feel with fast loading times, offline access, push notifications, and a responsive design that adapts to various devices. Furthermore, websites will integrate voice commerce with NLP which will facilitate voice search and voice-oriented shopping.
As per the prediction by Federica Laricchia, a researcher at Statista, more than 75% of people in the US will own a smart speaker in the year 2025 which means more people will rely on voice search.
Conversion rates of consumers
The ultimate goal of every e-commerce business is to convert the traffic into customers. As e-commerce websites have a huge number of organic traffic this industry is growing with significant numbers but conversion of customers is something that has been a challenge for years.
Technology Trends:
To tackle this challenge Ecommerce businesses will shift their focus on target marketing. With CRM, big data analytics, and AI Ethics taking the front seat, e-commerce sites, and apps are on the way to get users personalized experiences.
Luis Catter, Conversion Rate Optimisation Expert at Kensium Solutions, has his predictions about how personalization will continue to evolve alongside data concerns:
“Personalisation will eventually make its way to the Internet of Things.” We’ll see recommendations on our doorbell cameras and thermostats in addition to search engines and shopping portals. We will, however, have the option to opt-out once portions of the legislation are put into effect. As a result, there will be an intriguing divide between those who have highly customized experiences and those who do not. This will have intriguing effects on our ability to reach new users as advertisers.
Major Disruption in supply chains
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the streets, the production and distribution all around the globe has been disrupted. This has impacted the supply chain management of thousands of e-commerce companies.
Technology Trends:
To improve the supply chain problems, businesses should focus on bringing flexibility and agility to their work. With such flexible and improved systems, they will become future-ready for all the pandemics and such events.
Through technology, this task of making the business flexible will become quite easy as the companies can analyze the data and then move forward with the decision so that all the decisions would be informed but calculated.
Mismanagement In Workforce
Almost every e-commerce website no matter the sector faces challenges in hiring the right number of employees and delegating tasks accordingly. Some of them experience higher employment while some are on the lower side. Not having enough employees can lead to overloading work on existing employees. It will make them less productive and they will soon quit the job. On the other hand, overstaffing will lead to unnecessary high expenses decreasing your profit.
Technology Trends:
To deal with this problem, businesses are also working to adopt new technologies like advanced mobile point-of-sale systems and self-checkout systems.
Image Source: Freepik
Molly Flaherty from Novicell predicts that mobile commerce (mCommerce) will continue to grow in popularity. As consumers become more comfortable with mobile devices, especially Millennials and Gen Z, companies should adapt their websites for mobile use.
These technologies will help reduce the pressure on the sales team and streamline the workforce by improving customer experience. In traditional systems, retail staff have the responsibility to give services to the customer in the store but with these systems, there is no need to hire a staff for this as the POS systems at different places will provide all the services to the customer.
Final Thoughts
The E-commerce industry is going to advance at a rapid pace in the upcoming future with a major role of technology in this advancement. Technologies had and will have a significant role in making any e-commerce platform seamless and smooth.
Business owners must understand how crucial it is to adopt these technologies and have an effective product development strategy for eCommerce. They will not only give you an edge over your competitors but also help you improve your user experience, sales, and revenue over the years.
Harikrishna Kundariya is a marketer, developer, IoT, Cloud & AWS savvy, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies. His 14+ years of experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and SaaS applications.
