What Ecommerce Trends Will Define 2022?

Table of Contents

1. The Rise of Social Commerce
2. Sustainability and Ethical Shopping
3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
4. Personalization and AI-Driven Recommendations
5. Voice Commerce
6. Subscription-Based Ecommerce Models
7. Faster and Smarter Delivery Options
8. Conclusion

Ecommerce has established phenomenal growth within the last decade, yet 2022 will mark a true defining moment for online retail. Customer behavior keeps changing; businesses, therefore, keep shifting their adaptions to competitive necessity. Several trends of e-commerce will, in 2022, continue to inform the phenomenon, ranging from technologies to evolving customer preferences. 

As an established brand as well as a new entrant in the eCommerce world, riding ahead of these trends is the ultimate way for a person to gain long-term success. 

We shall then see the trends defining eCommerce in 2022 and how these business trends can be used for advantage by the entities.

Just In Time For The Rise Of Social Commerce

For 2022, it will be a time in which social commerce will continue to rise, turning platforms that are highly relied on, such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, into a retail place. Sell through social media and use apps without requiring the customer ever to leave the application.

Social commerce is said to have understood that consumers shop at the places where they spend time the most-and that is social media, and now prefers creating a minimal standard operating procedure within the application. Post to brands, promote by influencers, complete purchases, and purchase through the app.

Prominent social commerce platforms in the year 2022 include:

Instagram: Instagram will redefine social commerce through shoppable posts taking it a notch higher especially for fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands. 

Facebook: Retailers can now create fully operational storefronts and sell directly through Facebook thanks to Facebook Shops.

TikTok: This app is popular for its viral content, but it’s been searching for innovative e-commerce features, like its collaboration with Shopify.

Actionable Tip: Businesses looking to exploit social commerce should prioritise developing fun, shoppable content that works on their audiences. Create effective avenues of getting the influence of popular personalities and user-generated content.

2. Sustainability and Ethical Shopping. 

It’s true that sustainability will grow even more an increasingly important factor for consumers in 2022, and it was already very important last year. Ethical shopping – that is, making consumption decisions in alignment with a brand’s environmental and social impact – has become an important aspect of buying behavior. 

Consumers have become quite conscious of the way their purchases affect the environment. This is why brands that have begun to pay attention to sustainability- into eco-friendly packaging, responsible sourcing and carbon-neutral shipping- are the most preferred. Nielsen said nearly 73 percent of consumers would be convinced to pay more for a product if the brand stood for sustainability.

The key sustainability trends worth watching in ecommerce include the following:

Eco-friendly packaging: Reduction or elimination of plastic, using recyclable materials or biodegradable materials instead.

Carbon-neutral shipping: Offering carbon-neutral shipping options- where the environmental impact of delivery is offset by the brand.

Ethical sourcing: Adding transparency in sourcing materials and ensuring that there is ethical labor practice.

Actionable Tip: Promote efforts in sustainability via proper message communicated to customers on product pages and social media, e.g. attaching certification badges like Fair Trade or CarbonNeutral.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in ecommerce has been on the rise, and quite appreciably in 2022. They allow immersive and interacting experiences in which consumers are in a position to make better purchasing choices. 

AR gives the shopper the capability to visualize products in their own environment while VR allows total immersive shopping experiences. For example, AR-enabled applications that let users “try-on” clothes, accessories, or makeup require no physical contact with the product. Conversely, a VR experience recreates a shopping experience in a store entirely in virtual, enabling browsing virtual aisles, trying things, and purchasing products-all while customers are at home.

Some areas of interest for AR and VR in e-commerce include the following:

• Virtual dressing rooms: These are AR applications that enable customers to put on clothes, shoes or makeup virtually through AR, hence limiting the returns.
• Virtual stores: VR experiences that enable customers to browse and shop in a fully immersive, digital environment.
• Product visualization: AR tools that let customers see how furniture or home decor will look in their living spaces before making a purchase.
• Actionable Tip: It is advisable for e-commerce companies to explore AR and VR solutions for their specific product category: for instance, virtual try-ons for fashion or AR visualization for home goods. Investing in AR and VR tools enhances the shopping experience while also reducing returns.

4. Customization and Recommendations Driven by AI

Personalization has been one of the outrunners ever since ecommerce started, and this is about to become better in 2022 with artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence and machine learning will enable e-commerce brands to be now highly customized according to different individual behaviors, preferences, and purchase histories as such help create a shopping experience with a highly-nuanced touch.

AI recommendations engines are ever-spreading their wings and narrowing their focus, to enable an ecommerce platform to recommend or suggest products that an individual customer is more likely to buy. This primarily results in the delivery of personalized content and product suggestions highly applicable to the consumer mindsets, leading to better conversions and satisfaction among the customers.

Key personalization strategies include:

• Product recommendations: Utilize AI to recommend products based on previous purchases, website navigation, and customer assumptions.
• Personalized marketing: Individualizing messages sent through email or advertisement consumption has been based on their shopping behavior.
• Price dynamic: Price changing according to the demand, competitor price, or customer based on AI.
• Actionable Tip: Companies should invest in AI-powered tools and platforms to enable personalization automation. A custom shopping experience-from personalized recommendations to dynamic pricing-greatly increases sales and loyalty from customers.

5. Voice Commerce

Voice search and voice-activated devices changed the way consumers used to interact with technology. The next stage of such evolution is voice commerce or v-commerce, which allows consumers to make purchases using a voice command. 

Such growth of voice commerce is anticipated to propagate loudly by 2022 as voice assistants find their way into daily lives. Shoppers will, generally, use more of their voice to search for products, compare prices, and ultimately buy. Voice-enabled devices can provide a hands-free, very convenient way of shopping, especially for tasks such as reordering products or checking for bargains.

Some factors that need consideration in voice commerce include:

• Voice search optimization: Ecommerce retailers need to optimize their websites for voice search queries, which are generally longer and more conversational than typed searches. 
• Integration with voice assistants: The businesses must think of integrating their stores with popular voice assistants for voice-activated shopping. 
• Actionable Tip: Ecommerce brands should make their content voice-search optimizable by applying natural language and long-tail keywords. Furthermore, consumers should be able to buy through voice assistants integrated with brands to catch the growing voice shopping audience.

Subscription-Based Ecommerce Models

Beauty, food, and fitness have all tried their hands at subscription prototypes that went sailing. In 2022, the subscription-based ecommerce model will bust its walls when more people choose to receive regular deliveries of their favorite products.

It offers brands that have long-term returns to customers as well as consistent revenues for building relationships. E-commerce businesses can also personalize their more engaging shopping experiences by designing subscription plans according to customer preferences.

A few of them include: 

Predictable Revenue Regular, incoming payments mean a company would be seeing income on a month-to-month basis. 

Customer Loyalty – Customers who are subscribed for the services will really use them regularly, which increases the possible lifetime value for the customer. 

Convenience-The buyer generally saves time as well as effort since products are brought to his doorstep. 

Take action: Flexible and personalized plans, subscription options should be taken into consideration for businesses. A good subscription program can bring about long-term loyalty among customers, increase their usage, and has resulted in steady revenue coming into the business.

7. Simpler and Faster Delivery Options 

While speed and timeliness have always been critical features of ecommerce success, they will be paramount in 2022. As customers are expecting even faster shipping times, brands have to set themselves up for absolutely cut-throat competition with each other.

Same-day and next-day delivery normally become de facto standards imposed by ecommerce monsters like Amazon. Businesses are finding out ways of making their logistics much more efficient: drones, autonomous vehicles, AI-powered delivery networks; everything is potentially going to change.

Some of the most important emerging trends in ecommerce logistics are: Same-day and next-day delivery: Speed is stealing the limelight over all else; companies are rushing to complete deliveries in the least possible time.

• Localized warehouses: Brands are establishing fulfillment centers closer to customers to minimize shipment time.
• Sustainable delivery: Eco-friendly delivery modes, such as electric vehicles for delivery, are gaining momentum.
• Actionable Advice: Ecommerce businesses should concentrate on optimizing their fulfillment and delivery processes into fast and reliable delivery options meeting customer expectations. Build speed into delivery methods for drones or local warehouses access as well.

Deducement

Artificial intelligent technology, consumer market, and convenience sofa turningly become the hallway of economy forums in 2022. As social selling becomes absolute and personalized shopping experiences evolve, voice commerce and increasingly speedy delivery services will need to be taken into account by ecommerce actors in order to position themselves ahead in the cutthroat competitive environment.

Brands really must remain aligned to consumers to ride these trends and optimally harness their strategies toward activating growth, maximizing loyalty, and blazing the trail in a world of ever-changing ecommerce.