Rising Trends in Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, has been an important aspect of online selling for many years. Millions of people use mobile devices to shop online, and as technology continues to advance there will be more people doing so. Trends in mobile commerce continue to change as technology advances, so if you want your business to succeed you need to stay on top of the popular mobile trends for each new year. The following statistics will you some of the mobile commerce trends that are going to make a big impact in 2018.

Voice Searching & Shopping

One trend that should be popular for mobile commerce this year is the use of voice control for online searching and shopping. According to Search Engine Land, 20% of the searches made on mobile devices in 2016 were made using voice commands. The increasing popularity of voice assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, has trained people to use their voices more when searching for particular items on mobile devices.

If you want to stay on top of this trend, you need to make sure that your online store is properly optimized for voice searching. If your store is already
optimized for mobile, try to offer voice-enabled search options so shoppers can easily search for the products they want. The popularity of voice control
will continue to rise in the coming years, and if you use it properly it can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Augmented Reality

You should also expect augmented reality (AR) to play a major part in mobile commerce this year. If you do not already know, augmented reality takes a
live view of an environment and projects an “augmented” object onto it that is not physically there. Brands like Ikea have found massive success with augmented reality, since their customers can use their phones to see what a piece of furniture would look like in their houses before finalizing a purchase.

AR phone apps started appearing around two years ago, and many experts are already making notes about how customers are reacting to them. According to Forbes, 61% of online shoppers preferred buying from stores that had some kind of AR option available. When a customer can see what a particular product would look like in their homes, they feel more confident about making a final purchase.

Single-Click Payments

Another trend that is rising for mobile commerce is the addition of more options for single-click payments. Amazon held the exclusive rights to single-click payments for almost two decades, but its patent on these payments expired last year. Now that Amazon no longer has the exclusive rights to single-click payments, plenty of other online sellers will start incorporating them into their business strategies, and you should too.

Single-click payments can be extremely beneficial for online sellers, because it can help combat one of the industry’s biggest challenges: cart abandonment. According to Small Business Trends, 68.23% of customers abandon their online shopping carts. One of the reasons why this happens is because the checkout process is too long to finish. Allowing customers to simply tap one button on their phones to complete a purchase will speed up the checkout process, and help online retailers combat against cart abandonment.

Increased Prominence for Chatbots

Mobile messaging chatbots are becoming increasingly prominent in the business of mobile commerce, especially for ordering. For m-commerce, chatbots are generally used to guide customers through orders so they will have an easier time completing them. Chatbots answer customers’ questions in real time and learn about their shopping patterns. This gives the bots the chance to personalize the customers’ shopping experiences based on how conversations play out. If you would like to learn about how you can implement a chatbot on your website, please go here.

According to Entrepreneur 54.4% of people who use social media prefer to use messenger apps to contact brands. A majority of chatbots and messenger apps integrate with social media platforms like Facebook, so customers do not have to download a separate app to use them. Ultimately, chatbots can help you learn more about your customers’ shopping habits, which will allow you personalize their shopping experiences.

Taking advantage of the mobile market is crucial if you want to succeed as an online retailer. Want to learn more about the important role mobile plays for online sellers?