E-Commerce Mobile App Development Trends To Watch Out For

Every New Year comes with a new trend. Companies that are resolute to execute; are the ones that get rewarded with long-term customer loyalty and immeasurable positive outcomes.

Since the cornerstone of e-commerce culture has always been customer-first commitment, like every year, this year’s e-commerce mobile app development trends are also driven by innovation-led customer-centricity.

Truly best digital players cum e-commerce companies will up their game by testing and implementing these new trends in their retail/marketplace app solutions. By doing so, not only will they have a strategic advantage over their peers but these technological trends will help them scale their operations to support the surge in-demand and establish a solid go-to-market strategy.

Head on to unveil the top eCommerce App Development Trends of 2022.

Top E-Commerce Mobile App Development Trends in 2022

1. AR/VR To Enhance Online Shopping Experience

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology exists in almost every e-commerce industry to facilitate customers with an interactive online shopping environment. In online shopping, AR/VR technology enhances the customer’s shopping experience by the virtual try-on feature that enables them to try the products virtually on their body/brick-n-mortars before placing the orders.

In 2022, AR/VR integration in an e-commerce mobile app development will influence customer perception about the brand, help brands build firm marketing strategies, make your business more advanced, modern, and innovative. Eventually, this interactive and quality customer experience will increase customer loyalty towards the brands and products.

Further, fueled by the interactive shopping experience, it will help online stores minimize cart abandonment, product return, or replacement, as the user can actually visualize and conclude whether the product will turn out to be a good choice or not.

2. Voice Search Will Become Prevalent

Voice Search feature is evolving the traditional search and shop mode. It is making the searching experience quite convenient, quick, and easy to access for all because it is not language-specific. This feature personalizes the customers’ shopping experience by taking command from the user in their native language and list the available results on the platform.

Voice Search is an intelligent AI-enabled technology that can understand the speech and deciphers the keywords, based on that generates the result. These results could specifically be of the brand, category, size, gender, color, fabric, style, and many more features. Voice Search not only produces a frictionless shopping experience but also supports organizations and businesses to maximize customer value and drive performance.

Bonus!-This tech-inspired searching requires quick result pages, so the site loading page should be fast, otherwise, it will be dropped from the search result list. Likewise, most of the users usually search for products/services near them so the location-specific search would work as a competitive edge, along with other benefits.

3. AI To Increase Leads With Upselling and Cross-Selling

AI with Machine Learning studies the search and buying pattern of every customer, based on that designs an algorithm to customize every user’s shopping experience. AI continuously collects data from each customer’s shopping and purchasing style i.e., what product they are looking for and what they are finally purchasing.

Only the technology can track individual customers’ shopping patterns, as it can compare all the previous data to refresh the customers’ shopping patterns. Based on that, AI yields customized product suggestion to attract and gain customers’ attention instantly. However, such customer-specific assistance won’t be possible through traditional shopping mediums.

In addition to that, the AI-enabled e-commerce app can also provide ongoing search-based suggestions in real-time. These suggestions could be in the form of upselling or cross-selling of products from different or same retailers. The advancement in technology delivers personalized customer experience and assistance as well. AI-enabled chatbots integration in an e-commerce app supports customized and instant customer services. It is and will be one of the most trending and demanding tech integrations in e-commerce mobile app development space.

4. Personalized Shopping Experience with Big Data To Take Centerstage

Big Data supports e-commerce businesses by establishing a 360 view of their customers. Using big data analytics, companies can segment their customers based on their gender, location, age, social media presence. With this data, companies can analyze the search and shopping behavior of the customer, plan targeted advertising with customized offers, and launch campaigns only for a specific group of customers.

This analysis of data also support e-commerce businesses to predict the customers’ shopping style and deliver personalized shopping recommendation that eventually helps in increasing customer engagement and spending.

With all these capabilities, Big Data will introduce empathy and creativity in its data analytics to communicate with customers. E-Commerce companies will also prefer big data for data analysis to detect malicious activities, frauds, and secure payment modes. Nowadays, payment-related frauds are the major concern for customers hence, big data technology will come to the rescue to ensure a heightened online payment security process.

5. Chatbots Will Entirely Transform Shopping Experience

Chatbots are in the marketing industry for the past few years, later with the integration of Neural Networks technology, the chatbot experience has improved exponentially. The shoppers are now very impatient and busy too, they need relevant results instantly rather than indulging in the app for too long. These chatbots are no less than in-store sales associates during online shopping that plays a crucial role to carry out the sale swiftly and smoothly.

The AI-enabled chatbots offer 24×7 customer support services that can extend assistance at any time of the day. It reduces customer waiting time and resolves customers’ issues in the minimum possible time. Such bots are very sensitive to human interaction and understand their emotions, based on that it transfers the customer assistance to human customer support to resolve the issue appropriately.

The chatbot is an intelligent and efficient tool in the e-commerce industry to handle multiple customers at a time effortlessly. It minimizes human labor and is cost-effective as well. Apart from that, these tools don’t get tired of a monotonous task or require any break from long working hours, which ultimately increases the efficiency of the business and customer assistance.

6. New Marketplaces and Brisk Distribution Channels Continue To Foray

The online marketplaces offer a wide range of products from different sellers and manufacturers. In an e-commerce platform, most of the sellers are the ‘third-party sellers’ who use the platforms’ services. These businesses will continue to work as a new marketplace from where customers can explore similar options from different sellers.

With online sales, the distribution channels don’t only have to fulfill the stock supply to the retailers, rather deliver it to the end customer. These multiple distribution channels ensure quick delivery on the customers’ demand.

Global marketplaces such as Walmart and Amazon are offering multiple distribution channels to engage a variety of businesses and serve a wide number of customers at a time. The ease of business and customer reach is working as a boon for small retailers, so these retailers are likely to ignore the platform usage charge. The trend of new marketplace app development in the e-commerce industry is likely to grow only.

7. Localize and Personalize Customer Experience Will Become More Granular

Digitalization has expanded the buyer and sellers reach, which made the global market a glocal market. Thus, businesses don’t have to expand their business physically, they can be at their place and reach out to worldwide consumers, tap and cater to their exact needs through hyper-personalization rich omnichannel experience.

Now the global marketplace is no less than local, as consumers all over the world expect a notch-above customer-targeted experience with top-quality products. To ensure customized assistance, the latest tech trends are exercised to deliver a personalized customer experience.

8. Multiple Payment Options To Remain Forever In Cult

With the increasing trend of online payment, there exist multiple platforms to carry out payment digitally. Therefore, these e-commerce platforms need to be integrated with multiple payment systems to facilitate customers with full ease and convenience of choices.

The multi-payment platform integration minimizes cart abandonment, hassle-free checkout, increases customer conversion rate, and customer satisfaction. All these third-party payment tools also support multiple languages, currency convertors, and a recognizable local payment solution that covers a wide demographic to simplify customers’ needs.

Such localized and trusted multiple payment options promote customers to prefer the specific e-commerce app solution to place their orders. Evidently, it develops a sense of trust among customers and the e-commerce platform.

9. Blockchain – A New Transformation in E-Commerce Industry

Blockchain is a brilliant technology that is surpassing its presence in the e-commerce industry as a ‘savior’ of all things challenges. Blockchain technology can transform the entire eCommerce marketplace by providing a highly secure environment that is beneficial for both buyers and sellers/retailers.

Blockchain maintains data security, eliminates data threats or cyber-attack issues which brings a great sense of relief for businesses and customers. It is built on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) which provides the best online database platform security. It also enables different management systems integration to organize supply chain workflow and facilitate online transactions between buyers and sellers transparently.

The influence and impact of blockchain in the e-commerce industry are going to be very huge in the near future and will transform the online shopping experience to a great extent.

10. Standardized Shipping & Warehouse Management

Business automation has eased warehouse management and shipping processes. Now, the competition among businesses is getting fierce which is promoting a standardized shipping system and automated warehouse management to fasten the whole process. The steady upgrades in the product shipping and delivery process are enhancing the overall consumer experience.

All such processes can be easily managed with e-commerce mobile app development, such as unique identification of each inventory with bar-codes, in-stock and out-stock tracking, delivery status, product packaging, additional shipment charges, and many more. Additionally, businesses follow new tactics to attract more customers such as free delivery options, within-a-day delivery options, drone delivery, instant delivery services, etc.

11. Continuous Innovations With API-driven & Headless E-Commerce

In a Headless e-commerce platform the front-end and back-end of the platform are detached from each other, thus both work independently. It ultimately allows flexible and quick platform development and the entrepreneur possess complete ownership of the site architecture. It allows easy API integration to customize the complete website experience.

The development of a headless e-commerce website becomes easier as it is not bound to any specific language expertise. The instant customization by integrating APIs will allow businesses to follow the latest marketing strategies, stay updated with trends, and remain in the competition while retaining and gaining new customers simultaneously.

The regular updates in the e-commerce app development can deliver a unique customer experience, integrate user-friendly interfaces, with free and quick delivery services, etc. In general words, the API-driven, headless e-commerce platform development in a true sense follows the agile development model because e-commerce app development is usually quite a complicated process.

Related reading : How We Create eCommerce Websites with Scrum?

The Nucleus!

To enable speed in the e-commerce industry, companies have to get 3 things right—customer centricity, a test-and-learn culture, and automated operations that powers companies to rapidly react.

As per the Mckinsey research, more than a half-cent of companies who are performing well are swift enough to quickly respond to ideas and execute changes in the products/services or the way they work.

So, to up your value chain you have to quickly adapt to these trends that will make your company agile, robust, and customer-centric inside out.