In addition to this, we must also take into account the arrival of new buyers, Generation Y, also called "millennials" (people born between the early 80s and the late 90s), and even worse with Generation Z (people born from the year 2000), born at the same time as the public internet and smartphones. This is an even more important point since these new buyers are looking for practicality , ease of use , speed or even technology .
To help you see things more clearly, here is our guide which covers 6 essential e-commerce practices so as not to be left on the sidelines in 2024.
In this photo, a man is on an e-commerce site on his computer, phone and tablet.
1. The growth of mobile commerce
With increasingly powerful smartphones, almost unlimited mobile plans, applications for everything and nothing, etc., we all live with our phones in our hands. And let's be clear, we don't just wander the internet looking for cute cat videos! No, we also make purchases or research the products and services we use.
Proof of this is that, according to SaleCycle, 56% of e-commerce worldwide is done via a phone . On public transport, in a waiting room, or at the office during our lunch break, we optimize every downtime.
Mobile commerce (M-commerce) has therefore been growing steadily for several years. The Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown have changed consumer habits, which explains in particular why online purchases have never been so healthy.
And believe us, this trend will only intensify in 2024. And contrary to popular belief, it will not only concern B2C companies, but also B2B. Indeed, professionals are also getting into mobile commerce.
While Google has been giving much more importance to smartphone-friendly sites for several years now, companies must offer the best possible mobile experience to their customers.
Is it necessary to specify that the e-commerce sector is office 365 database one of the first affected and that you must adapt your company's strategy?
In this year 2024, an online sales site must therefore be:
Optimized for mobile browsing ( responsive and mobile first website);
Technically optimized to improve loading speed of pages, product images, etc.;
User-friendly and intuitive ;
Easy to use;
Secure (data and payment security);
Personalized.
In short, you need to think “Progressive Web App” for your online store. But what does that mean?
Progressive Web Apps use the latest technological solutions to combine the best web and mobile applications. With such tools, shopping sites look like a mobile application .
Meeting this new demand is essential to facilitate the mobile shopping experience, but also to attract and retain your customers, and therefore increase your sales.
Another alternative is to set up a mobile application, as many brands have done: Zara, Amazon, Airbnb, etc. And if you need to be convinced before making such an investment, know that the conversion rate of a mobile application is 157% higher than on an online sales site. It would be a shame to deprive yourself of it, right?
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2. Artificial intelligence and the e-commerce sector
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new, but its accessibility for all is quite recent. Whether you are for or against it is not the point, you have to know how to live with the times and conform to the market. Your e-commerce strategy must therefore evolve in this direction, because more than a threat to certain professions, AI is also a way to take your online store to the next level .
Already present on many websites, chatbots (conversational agents) now benefit from advances in artificial intelligence. If many of us have a bad image of chatbots, due to the first rather primitive agents, today's chatbots, if they are well implemented, have nothing to do with it. They understand user requests much better and offer effective and natural responses . In addition, thanks to Machine Learning, AI learns as it interacts with consumers.
But generative AI doesn't stop there! It now offers many solutions, starting with automation, which is revolutionizing the strategies of the e-commerce sector. While its applications are multiple, automation is particularly useful for optimizing the various processes of an e-store in terms of management: orders, logistics, invoicing, delivery and its tracking, returns, etc.
Imagine the time you can save by offloading these tasks. In addition to increasing your operational efficiency, or that of your team, you reduce processing times. In a world that is moving ever faster and in which consumers are increasingly in a hurry, improving your processing time is not without impact.
Also note that automation is now integrated into various online CRM and CMS platforms, including Shopify with its Shopify Magic tool, the platform of choice for many online merchants. For example, you can automate :
Writing product descriptions;
Writing emails and marketing campaigns ;
Description-based image creation, with solutions like Dall-E , Midjourney , Adobe Firefly ;
Generation of summaries or reviews;
Automatic translation of product sheets;
Etc.
Finally, a big step forward in the e-commerce sector: predictive analysis boosted by AI . This feature makes it possible to automatically anticipate sales and trends to help companies improve their inventory management.
This way, you can anticipate your sales in order to identify the products concerned, the quantity to be expected and the moment to restock. Until now, this type of functionality was only accessible to online sales giants, such as Amazon.
As we’ll see later, AI can also help your business deliver a better customer experience with deeper personalization, such as product recommendations. Recommendation systems use AI algorithms to suggest products to users based on their browsing history and previous purchases.
3. Personalization pushed to its maximum
Among the best practices in this year 2024, there is one that affects many online (and offline) sectors: personalization. Users and customers actually like to feel listened to, important, pampered, etc.
Today, we are all looking for a unique experience. Also, to stand out from your competitors, customization must be mastered on different aspects. Let's take stock.
Personalization of the customer experience
By 2024, B2B consumers expect to have the same online shopping experience as B2C customers – a fully personalized customer experience .
While it goes without saying that customer experience is essential for acquisition, it is also important to remember that it is essential for customer loyalty. After all, being satisfied is essential for returning to order from a website. In addition, a happy customer is a customer who recommends the store to their friends and family.