By Daniel Brzezinski, GetResponse
Each year, online sales continue to grow at a steady pace. By the end of 2016, worldwide retail e-Commerce sales are expected to reach $1.915 trillion, according to eMarketer — a new record.
But what could slow this growth? Alternatively, what will drive the category forward? As retail marketers gear up for 2017, here are three of the most critical and interesting e-Commerce and retail trends from the past year.
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Mobile E-Commerce: Still A Gift And A Curse
In 2016, mobile consistently beat out desktop as an e-Commerce traffic source. Last year, mobile accounted for 22% of all retail e-Commerce sales in the U.S. But the rapid adoption of mobile buying has caught legacy brick-and-mortar retailers — as well as pure-play e-tail businesses — off-guard.
They’re still evolving as technologists capable of adapting digital marketing and shopping experiences to smaller screens and across different channels within the mobile environment. That includes mobile web, app, email, text, chatbots and more. When you combine that learning curve with exploding fragmentation across software and hardware, optimizing mobile has only grown harder this year.
Chatbots Are Driving More Conversational Commerce
Chatbots have exploded over the past year. Everyone from technology companies like Facebook to Microsoft and retail brands like J. Crew and Staples have invested in the space. And it’s clear why. Chatbots signal a more real-time, personalized approach to customer engagement. Its ‘conversational commerce’ feels more human and authentic than most marketing, despite being a simulation. Bots also offer a convenient, responsive form of interaction customers crave. Beyond marketing, for e-Commerce, transactions via bot have also become a reality. Facebook’s recent decision to bring PayPal to Facebook Messenger is just the first step in scaling it for business applications.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Has Increased
For retailers, the online shopping cart abandonment rate globally is 75% — a new high. Mobile has made things worse as attention spans tend to be shorter on smaller screens, despite driving a higher share of e-Commerce traffic than desktop.
As the cart abandonment problem has increased this year, retailers and e-Tailers have adopted a wider set of tools to try to counteract lost transactions. Retargeting is no secret as a weapon for e-Tailers, and investments have only grown there. But compared to previous years, more marketers are sending triggered cart abandonment emails than ever before, according to our own data. We’re also seeing higher performance across triggered cart abandonment emails, as these messages have become more personalized through improved and larger data sets. Ultimately, those success rates could show that abandoned carts are simply part of a longer, modernized customer journey online.
E-Commerce advertisers in 2016 were faced with several challenges having to do with the evolution of technology, as well as online shopping habits. And they’ll need to figure out the most logical way to address them in the New Year.
Daniel Brzezinski (@DanielBrzezinsk) is CMO and VP of Marketing and Product Development at GetResponse. In addition to product development, his professional experience includes Research & Analytics, Brand Architecture & Positioning, and Brand Identity & Messaging. GetResponse serves more than 350,000 active users from 182 countries, delivering more than 1 billion permission-based emails per month, with an average deliverability rate of more than 99%. With 15 years of experience, GetResponse has delivered online marketing solutions that are available in 21 different languages.