Last year, Europe represented 30% of e-commerce revenue worldwide with the United Kingdom, France and Spain in the lead.
Although the e-commerce sector was marked by the rise of personalisation of delivery, social selling and more secure payment procedures in 2019, there are other subjects that need to be addressed in 2020. While e-commerce has totally transcended physical channels and retailers continue to invest in technology, to increase the ‘e’ in e-commerce now seems almost superfluous.
We have already covered the subject of environmentally friendly and smart stores in a previous post published after Paris Retail Week.. It is now time to talk about other essential trends to follow in 2020…
Discover 5 major retail trends for 2020
Affiliation for e-commerce: not a thing of the past!
Even though it’s not a new term,affiliation is still in the news because it’s an effective means of earning money in the e-commerce sector.. E-commerce affiliation is still a foolproof marketing practice when opening or developing an e-commerce store,.
the aim being to have your products or services promoted byindividuals (bloggers, YouTubers, influencers, etc.) or by websites (price comparison or editorial sites, etc.).
How?
- By individuals: viaintegration of links into their content, redirecting their followers/subscribers to items. The affiliate is paid by commission on the sales achieved.
- Through web pages: via links or banners redirecting users to your website. Consequently, you can generate leads from the affiliation link.
Let’s take the example of Amazon: its affiliation programme has more than 500,000 affiliated sites, so why not give it a try?
If you’re one of those people who wants to become an influencer or if you just want get you business known by other e-merchants, you need to be active on social media and, most importantly, to use them properly…
Times are changing… make way for voice commerce!
In 2019, China had 855 million users of smart speakers compared to 742 million in the USA and 126 million in the UK.
French consumers are increasingly using voice searching for their online shopping. According to the experts, 30% of websites visited in 2020 will be via voice searching. For this reason, your e-commerce sites need to be adapted to evolutions in searching behaviour, because the search engines will be announcing radical changes a few months from now.
60% of users of virtual assistants have already made purchases by vocal command. Between now and 2021, more and more brands will include voice search functions on their websites.
And when are you planning to integrate voice SEO into your search engine optimisation strategy?
The evolution in payment methods
These days, you need to be aware that 80% of online payments are made via bank cards and 11.5% with online wallets.. With the rise in power of cryptocurrencies, your companies need to offer customers different ways of paying to ensure the journey from the shopping basket to the final purchase is completed.
Payment by fingerprint recognition
Authentication by biometrics could become the norm between now and 2022, under the influence of the European Payment Services Directive 2.. This payment method should offer protection against fraud and European buyers should feel more secure when making purchases online.
The Amazon approach
According to the Wall Street Journal, the giant Amazon is said to have made a fairly exclusive request to the United States patents and Trade Marks Office… to be able to create a technology making it possible to carry out payments with one’s fingerprints, by combining bank card data with the hand of its owner. This would work via a contactless « ‘palm-scan’ scanner using the biometric characteristics of the palm of the hand which would be linked to the customer’s Amazon account.
Although the project is still in an initial testing phase, the Seattle company appears to have already begun a collaboration with Visa to test new biometric terminals and is also thought to have approached Mastercard Wells Fargo or Synchrony Financial. Ingenious or scary? We’ll let you be the judge…
Payment by facial recognition
As the name suggests, payment by facial recognition makes it possible to carry out a payment using the different facial features of an individual.. A camera compares your face to a photo previously registered on your account and carries out an analysis of different target points..
Not highly regarded in France (this process is illegal in Europe in public spaces without a dispensation from CNIL), it is a method much used in China.. Some attempts by the fast food chain KFC have already proved to be encouraging in Hangzhou.
Now that you have an idea about the trends to follow, it’s up to you to adapt them to your market!
