Dive into the Future of Commerce: Industry Experts’ Insights on eCommerce Trends 2022 & Beyond

‘The COVID-19 recovery will be DIGITAL’, and we are already experiencing the high tides of the digital-first world. The latest report by Adobe reveals that 87% of surveyed senior executives from a lot of 10,000 marketers worldwide agree that the events of 2020-21 have re-wired the way people shop and businesses operate. To capitalize on this shift to digital, mainstream and laggard organizations must overcome the technology silos and double down on the transformation to pull through. That said, we are bringing the most advantageous eCommerce trends for 2022 and beyond that are shaping an agile, collaborative, and scalable future of commerce.

In this ‘Age of the Customer’, exceptional commerce experience is the key to a future-proof business. The latest commerce trends of 2022 are the ones that every business needs to keep an eye on and start adapting before it’s too late. For this elaborative compilation on the eCommerce trends 2022, we asked a few industry leaders to share their thoughts. Get ready for some exclusive ‘experts’ take’ on the trends. Let us have a look at the top trends first:

This list of eCommerce trends 2022 explores a variety of areas impacting a brand’s capabilities to navigate through the dynamic commerce landscape. To match with the rapidly changing consumer preferences, economic complexities, and competition – this is your guide to get through! About time we start with the very first trend and get the ball rolling.

Consumer preferences and buying habits are changing. The pandemic-inspired buying behavior may be stagnant but long from fading. The adoption of online commerce is going to shoot from here on, and brands need to adhere to this ‘new normal’. With each passing day, the line of physical and digital is blurring. Consumer expectations have reached a level where they want unified experiences with each interaction and at every touchpoint. The new normal for 2022 and beyond is going PHYGITAL and merging the brick and click.

Phygital offers the best of both worlds: Physical and Digital in a way that merges the two and improves the shopping experience. Leveraging wearable technology, intuitive in-store and online product recommendations, Livestream shopping, QR codes, and even AR-VR-enabled buying guides are a few of the examples that the forward-thinking eCommerce brands are adding to offer a navigable experiential shopping experience to their customers.

Expert’s Take

– Marsha Naidoo, Country Head – USA – Krish

Personalization in the time of privacy has raised concerns even among the most established businesses and enterprise-grade brands with advanced technologies. The woke consumers today are knit-picking the way they share their data and are savvy enough to identify the leaks. According to a study by Salesforce, 72% of customers stated that they would stop engaging with a brand because of privacy concerns. With Google and Apple rolling out updates over the cookieless culture, first-party and zero-party data are going to take center stage this year.

With third-party data dying a slow death, advanced marketing automation platforms will emerge as heroes of the cookieless world where user behavior and interactions will surpass the good old profiling and segmentation strategies. Marketers need to spend 2022 honing their new prospecting techniques, building lookalike audiences, testing new campaigns, conceiving engagement initiatives from their first-party data, and of course, humanizing their approach!

Expert’s Take

– Aleksander Skałka, Strategies Director – SALESmanago

As part of the cultural shift, the world became increasingly tumultuous post-pandemic. People search for ways to protect and comfort themselves. In a recent series, ‘Ogilvy On: Hope Create Impact’, the marketing masters shared key shifts defining our new reality where Conscious Commerce emerged as a relatively influential term. The same series revealed that about 90% of consumers believe brands have a responsibility to take care of the planet and its people, while 84% of the Gen Z customers say they would only buy from a brand that stands for something. As the marketing focus tilts towards responsible targeting, 2022 would also see a deep emphasis on sustainability, brand values, social responsibility, empathy, and an overall reduction in carbon footprints.

The most influential eCommerce trend for 2022 and beyond!

The recent Adobe 2022 Digital Trends Report reveals that 92% of senior executives agree that ‘our ability to be agile will determine our success as a marketing organization’. Organizational agility has never been more vital. Businesses need flexible tech stacks that can comply with the changing industry needs, innovation, upgrades, consumer preferences, and marketing requirements. It is not practical to operate siloed systems and frontends to engage with customers at every touchpoint. The cost and complexity of implementation, integration, and operation would significantly increase over time.

Solution? The adoption of Composable Commerce. The API-first architecture is making ripples for the convenience, control, and connection it offers. Composable or Headless Commerce is a model that decouples the head, i.e., frontend of an online store, and loosely ties it to the backend via APIs. The headless architecture works on MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) principles that allows merchant-centric, customer-focused, and future-proof MarTech stack.

The Headless concept isn’t new, but 2022 accelerated its adoption as more and more brands fell in love with its advantageous offerings. With Headless in place, along with being digital-first, brands could also focus on experience-first technologies and elevate customer experience. It is the holy grail for developers as experimentation is possible. A few platforms making Headless a success are commercetools, Magento PWA Studio, Shopify, VTEX, Contentful, and Shogun. At the same time, AI is at the forefront of customer experience and is transforming headless stores with cutting-edge capabilities. The brands bringing their A-game in this genre are Yellow.ai, Haptik, Bobble.ai, Vue Storefront, Gorgias, and more.

Experts’ Take
– Patrick Friday, CEO – Vue Storefront

– Jiten Padmashali, CEO & MD – Krish

As they say, Convenience + Customization = D2C

Direct-to-Consumer businesses are on the rise since a very long time, and 2022 is no different. D2C growth continues to trend upwards, reaching $129 billion in the US alone in 2021, and is predicted to cross $175 billion by 2023. The D2C inclination is real, and consumers are turning towards it with open arms. We have seen brands like Nike, Casper, BarkBox, Heinz, and more running on this model and achieving success since forever, but with increasing popularity, SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) are giving in to this trend too.

Emerging brands are well-aware of the market scenarios, the privacy concerns, and all that buzz around gaining first-party data. D2C establishes a direct connection with the consumers, allowing them to customize and personalize their shopping experience. Moreover, the subscription model and loyalty program too can take a front seat here. With advanced technology and AI intervention, D2C brands see significant growth if rendered correctly. Better relationships with customers, data insights and better future planning, personalized shopping journeys, customized storefronts, more margin, hyper-targeted marketing are a few benefits that D2C brands can enjoy, and thus, the inclination towards building a distinctive brand is only going to increase in 2022 and further.

The most growth-driving eCommerce trend for 2022 and beyond!

Voice search, conversational commerce, AI-powered voice assistive technology, or voice shopping is gaining traction with each passing day. Smart speakers and voice assistants are a popular choice for web search, and with NLP (Natural Language Processing) advancements, eCommerce platforms can enable product discoveries and instigate purchases through conversational commerce. Conversational AI platforms are already gaining traction for holistic conversational support via chatbots, messengers, smart speakers, and more. The swift and accurate response time here is the driving factor for most consumers.

Juniper Research forecasts that voice commerce will be over USD 80 billion by 2023. With staggering accuracy levels in displaying user queries, a future where people will summon their shopping carts is not far away. Gartner predicts that 80% of large enterprises will need to have a conversational-technology-focused center of excellence or skills resource by 2025 and to get a piece of this growing trend, brands are actively looking to advance their conversation commerce capabilities.

The social media influence in Gen Z is not surprising, but as an effect of the pandemic, more and more Millennials and Baby Boomers are seen using social platforms to stay connected, explore opportunities, and gather information. Forecasts suggest that the value of social commerce sales would reach around a whopping $2.9 trillion by 2026. The fact that businesses can market and sell products on social platforms so customers can buy without ever leaving the platform is a major trend in 2022.

Social commerce enables frictionless experience and allows brands to engage with customers on the socials where they’re already spending their time. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, retailers can harvest real-time data on consumer behavior and turn it into practical and actionable insights. Facebook marketplace, Instagram shops, Pinterest boards, and Whatsapp business every other thing is vouching for people to shop from social media, and brands are leveraging it to their advantage.

Expert’s Take

– Pratyush Kukreja, VP and GM for India and Africa –Haptik 

An eCommerce trend for 2022 with ‘seamless CX’ written all over it!

Connected, consistent, and multichannel is the future of commerce. There are many who have already adopted omnichannel, and in 2022, brands will look forward to further strengthening their omnichannel capabilities to get ahead of the curve. According to Adyen – a global payments platform, omnichannel shoppers spent 200% more than the single-channel shoppers amidst the COVID-19 surge. Improving customer service and streamlining the omnichannel experience is at the epicenter for 2022.

Customers want to buy online and return in-store, as well as checkout in-store, using an app, while businesses are found to focus on this significantly less. The expectation gap where customers want a streamlined experience across all touchpoints at all times can be bridged only by investing in unified commerce. The omnichannel narrative is going to emphasize more on customer experience than ever before.

Experts’ Take

– Anupa Gandhi, Strategic eCommerce Consultant, Middle East – Krish

– Manthan Dave, Solution Architect & Magento Master – Krish

With rising D2C models and privacy matters, loyalty is still an asset the brands can count on. Divided consumer attention, increasing competition, altering preferences, and rapidly changing technology cumulatively affects the new client acquisition costs. Keeping loyal customers by your side is still a mantra to sustain and thrive in 2022.

As stated by TransForm, loyal customers are 5X more likely to re-buy, 5X more likely to pardon, 4X more likely to recommend, and 7X more likely to try a new service or product – and it gives all the more reasons to focus on personalizing and customizing the shopping experience for your existing customers. Loyalty programs allow shoppers to redeem loyalty perks in-store or gain points from online purchases or actions to be redeemed later, irrespective of the channel. It enables brands to effectively collect data from engaged shoppers to create holistic, personalized experiences through multiple channels. Keeping your retention game strong will always work in your favor.

We might have become digital-first, it’s time we become customer-first

Meeting the consumers where they are, providing a seamless cross-channel customer experience, building an effective omnichannel strategy, merging the physical and digital, and offering new and improved ways to transact are nothing but a few terms that define customer experience. Meeting consumer expectations, if not exceeding them – has become a crucial part of any growth strategy. CX, however, is not a foreign term. Its importance has changed drastically since the pandemic, and the shifts are here to stay as long as people are buying online (which is probably forever). BOPIS (buy online, pay in-store), BNPL (buy now, pay later), curbside pickup, and more such emerging features are nothing but the results of demanding consumers and fulfilling brands.

A recent Zendesk customer experience trend report shows that 61% of customers switch to competitors after one bad experience. Focus on the CX is not new but certainly, will shape the eCommerce trends in 2022 and beyond. Brands need to step up their CX game to sustain their market share. It’s about time that CMOs (chief marketing officers) turn CXOs (chief experience officers) and drive positive customer interactions to win big in this experience-led eCommerce industry.

Expert’s Take

– Nikhil Kulkarni, Sales Director (UKI & MEA) – commercetools

– Bharat Maheriya, Director – Delivery, Krish

 

The way brands use data is not a secret anymore, and for businesses to attain customer information willingly is becoming challenging. With all this going on, in 2022 we will see a greater shift towards eCommerce brands needing to adopt responsible marketing techniques. Being relevant, helpful, and value-driven will be the focal point for brands to work on. Segmenting behaviors, purchase habits, and working on bottlenecks will help brands to create a marketing strategy that customers would like to engage with. Finding harmony with your consumer’s data privacy and security will only bolster trusted relationships, promote advocacy, and of course, most importantly, encourage loyalty.

Bonus Round on eCommerce Trends 2022

Apart from the most talked-about trends, there are a few which are prevailing but are surely going to take some wind around them in the near future. Touchless commerce or Contactless Retail is one of them. 2021 bred the germaphobes, and the wave of touchless transactions is not going anywhere. Consumers expect the online purchase journeys to be optimized to a level where facilities like BOPIS (Buy online, pick up in-store), curbside pick up, and BNPL (Buy now pay later) are integrated. On any given day, a seamless and unified shopping experience will talk volumes about your overall digital strategy.

Moreover, other trends likely to fall in our lap are Metaverse and NFTs. These are already creating noise but a wide adoption, just as we experienced with the Headless shift is yet to happen.