Experts’ Insights on eCommerce Trends & Beyond

The digital-first world isn’t approaching anymore, it has ARRIVED!

The accelerated growth in the eCommerce industry is here to stay and it has brought a tremendous shift in the ways businesses operate. From advanced tach stacks to unbridled customer experience, the pivot is visible in all aspects of the digital commerce fraternity. To make every shift count and be at the forefront of change, it is imperative that brands follow and adhere to the latest eCommerce trends. To know more about the trends, head over to our compilation of eCommerce trends for the 2022 article. We have a list of 11 future trends set to change the course of the industry.

Moreover, in our pursuit to keep our audience updated with all the latest and greatest taking place in this evolving landscape, we got in touch with industry leaders and magent eCommerce experts to share their knowledge on this very subject – eCommerce Trends for 2022 & Beyond.

Here’s a compendium of experts’ takes on the future of commerce. We also have 2 exclusive one-on-one interviews with two of these experts where they elaborate on the burning need of getting on the bandwagon of these eCommerce trends.

#1: Heading towards Headless Commerce

Expert’s Take

“2022 will be a year that will change the whole narrative of the digital commerce world. More than ever, consumers are digitally engaged with brands, looking for hyper-personalized and consistent CX. Headless commerce and MACH architecture are gaining traction. eCommerce brands are striving towards new fulfilment strategies, creating superior, fruitful, and omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints and building future-proof businesses. So, as the digital-first ecosystem demands, this is time for brands to go headless and deliver compelling CX while building long-lasting relationships with their consumer base.”
– Jiten Padmashali, CEO & MD, Krish

“I believe that 2022 will continue to be a year, where brands will experience further shift from Desktop to Mobile and focusing on the mobile will be a key to grow the revenue by uplifting conversions from that channel. Raising need for improved mobile experience will push forward the PWA adoption across small, mid and enterprise market. 2022 will also be the year where first implementations for full on headless stack will be showing up and that will boost the overall adoption. This means, we will see more and more Merchants picking backend, search, frontend, payments, CMS from different vendors instead of going for all-in-one monolith solutions.”
– Patrick Friday, CEO – Vue Storefront

#2: The Era of PHYGITAL

Expert’s Take

“The last two years have accelerated the growth of the eCommerce industry. This is no passing trend. We continue to see a blurring of the lines between digital and physical stores, as well as B2C and D2C eCommerce skyrocketing. According to Statista, in the US alone, online shopping revenue will surpass 1.3 trillion dollars by 2025. Even post-pandemic, while shoppers are returning to physical stores, we expect online shopping to continue to increase, due to significant changes in consumer shopping behavior”
– Marsha Naidoo, Country Head – USA – Krish

#3: Cookieless World is Approaching

Expert’s Take

“The year 2022 will be a year of hard goodbye to third-party-based marketing, and a year in which new CX leaders might emerge. As first-party data is well known already and quite widely used thanks to Customer Data Platforms and solutions that provide marketing automation capabilities, the focus is shifting now to go one step further in understanding customers’ needs and interests.D2C brands and multi-brand stores will utilize Customer Preference Centers that collect zero-party data directly from the end customer and will leverage on the data they will share to deliver better, personalized and omnichannel Customer Experience. Data collection alone will not guarantee success. Zero-party data needs to be perfectly merged with first-party tracking and used in marketing strategies based on customer segmentation, 1-to-1 and AI-driven personalization, and seamlessly orchestrated with marketing automation. It implicates necessary changes in MarTech stacks that should be either supplemented with additional systems and integrations or partially restructured by replacing a few different systems with end-to-end solutions that have it all on board.”
– Aleksander Skałka, Strategies Director – SALESmanago

#4: The Derivative of D2C

Expert’s Take

“D2C gives end-to-end control of creating, marketing and selling products directly to consumers via digital channels. The major advantage of being D2C is the direct access to customers data. Learning consumer buying behaviours helps manufacturers optimize existing products and, possibly, even create new product lines. Based on this data, brands can strategize their business operations accordingly and achieve growth. The pandemic has definitely urged the customers to shop online but for the brands, the challenges have leveled up in terms of providing an exceptional customer experience and post purchase strategy in order to stand out in the competition.”
– Aanchal Budhiraja, CX & Marketing, D2C – Reckitt

#5: The Game Changer: Conversational Commerce

Expert’s Take

“With an increasing number of D2C brands vying for consumers’ attention, the focus will shift towards ensuring delightfulness at every step of the user journey – be it product discovery to purchase to after-sales support, in order to attract, engage and retain consumers. Conversational AI solutions that are not just smart and efficient but that communicate with consumers in the evolving digital lingo of stickers and movie GIFs are leveraged by today’s new-age brands to provide a highly engaging and recall-worthy user experience. I believe that this trend will grow stronger in 2022 with an increasing number of brands upgrading their chatbot-support with rich-media powered conversational AI solutions; in turn converting their consumers into brand ambassadors and having them come back for more.”
– Disha Shah, Vice President Business – Bobble AI

Check out an exclusive interview with Disha Shah from Bobble.ai here.

“Devices and services are on your command, literally!
Voice assisted shopping and conversational commerce are no longer in their infancy. We will witness an upsurge as adoption of smart speaker rises globally.
In a cookie-less world, as data privacy is becoming ever-more important, marketers will need a first-party data approach to deliver personalized user experiences. The content will be more contextual targeted to humans instead of search engine bots.
As consumers’ shift from convenience to faster delivery times, chase to reduce store-to-door time to meet customers’ expectations will only become steeper.”
– Zenul Jinwala, Digital Marketing Head – Krish

“The pandemic rendered 2021 as a refresher year for businesses to adopt newer digital platforms to reach out to their customers and be present where they are. Customers’ growing demands for hyper-automation, extreme personalization and on-demand resolution requires AI capabilities to quickly understand, resolve and capitalize on every customer engagement. Conversational AI emerged as the front runner for enterprises for their CX automation tools. It has now become the foremost choice for first level customer interaction for most B2C brands. As per a report by Deloitte, the global conversational AI market, including chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22% during 2020–25, reaching almost US$14 billion by 2025. Since the pandemic, we have seen our customer base grow from 100 to over 1000, with more demands coming in from enterprises across industries.This year, the acceleration of digital initiatives, in response to the pandemic induced disruptions will be the primary focus of CIOs and transformation leaders. Prioritisation of CX is and will continue to drive innovation, with brands making a shift from single to omni-channel automation strategy. We foresee a disruption in the segment with the entry of Instagram Messaging Automation and WhatsApp Commerce. These direct to consumer platforms will be a game changer in staying in touch with the consumer and enabling a seamless omnichannel engagement for them.2022 will potentially witness an intersection (rather than functioning in vacuums) of CX and EX strategies to deliver TX – Total Experience Automation – capable of addressing the digital and non-digital needs of customers and employees, addressing their respective journeys, especially parts that intersect.”
– Vartika Verma, Global VP – Marketing, Yellow.ai

#6: So much of Social Commerce

Expert’s Take

“eCommerce has seen a rapid transformation over the past decade, and it continues to evolve. As consumer time spend moves towards social, messaging, content consumption and search, businesses have found innovative ways to sell. 2022 is going to be the year of Social Commerce. Brands will have to collaborate with influencers, celebrities to enhance the shopping experience. Additionally, WhatsApp will emerge as a leader in the Conversational Commerce space. Artificial Intelligence will enable brands to replicate the in-store experience digitally. AI-powered virtual try-on features are going to be a must-have! All digital touchpoints like search and social media would also double as digital storefronts for converting the user’s inspiration to a purchase. That said, brands will also invest heavily in building a delightful retail experience for their customers! Many players have and will continue to adapt the phygital model to enhance a consumer’s physical shopping experience. Brands need to have an omnichannel Customer Experience strategy driven by technology and empathy.”
– Pratyush Kukreja, VP and GM for India and Africa, Haptik

#7: The Omnichannel Narrative

Expert’s Take

“Modern customers, Modern technology – Yes, we have already entered the digital-first era. This era is shaped by the digital-first mindset and with the capability to quickly adapt the new trends.
As customer’s shopping behaviour and the technology keeps on changing with the time, two incredible concepts are buzzing around in the ecommerce industry – Omnichannel and Headless. I would encourage the merchants to build the effective omnichannel experiences on a headless platform. Headless commerce, which is defined as the separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application, provides retailers with more control over each and every customer touchpoint. The right ecommerce tech stack that headless approach brings, adds a lot of value to the overall customer experience and allows more flexibility to offer a greater degree of personalization and content consistency across multiple selling channels.”
– Anupa Gandhi, Strategic eCommerce Consultant, Middle East – Krish

“From a solution architect’s standpoint, the digital commerce space is pivoting towards agile, flexible, and experimental eCommerce technologies. Headless commerce architecture is strengthening the eCommerce tech stacks like never before, and technologies that are helping brands to scale with platform-agnostic capabilities will continue to gain traction for the years to come. Just like the past year, 2022 will also be on the course of omnichannel adoption for more unified and swift commerce solutions.”
– Manthan Dave, Solution Architect, Krish

#8: Exceptional Customer Experience (CX)

Expert’s Take

“With the changing shifts in recent times, the terms commerce and eCommerce have started to mean the same. It is the experience that matters, which now spans across digital and physical channels. I expect the same level of personal feel-good shopping experience from the John Lewis website as I get from its physical outlets. The digital channels need to provide the same level of personalization that a face-to-face shopping experience would provide, and merging the two is the key here to replicate the experiences. On top of that, you have to be ready for the trends that are taking the industry by a storm, such as social commerce, metaverse, crypto, VAR, AR, shoppable adverts (yes, check NBC Universal Checkout), and Tim Berners -Lee knows what!!! Among the many uncertainties, one future-proof solution is to upgrade your tech stacks with a modern commerce architecture followed by the MACH principle!”
– Nikhil Kulkarni, Sales Director, UKI & MEA – commercetools

Check out an exclusive interview with Nikhil Kulkarni from commercetools here.

“With the paradigm shift in the digital commerce landscape, there have been an array of changes in technological advancements. Industry players are investing in cutting-edge tech stacks for better operational efficiency and seamless CX. 2022 will see some of these techs in action. In the field of conversational commerce, voice search commands and AI-driven CX platforms will see more limelight, augmented and virtual reality are bound to be gaining more traction to lead the purchase decisions, and mobile commerce will take a new turn with the rise of PWA, making eCommerce truly omnichannel. The eCommerce businesses must now ensure that their transformation plans, tech stacks, and strategy meet the customers where they are.”
– Bharat Maheriya, Director – Delivery, Krish

#9: Contactless Commerce

Expert’s Take

“Pandemic inspired shifts are here to stay and will encourage contactless shopping experience for shoppers. As the non-essential retailers couldn’t let shoppers into their stores so Curbside Pickup had become a necessity during the early phases of pandemic where customers can just place an order and pickup at the nearest curb. Almost half of the retailers offered curbside pickups, which was just 7% in 2019. This contactless shopping method has now become more prominent and is here to stay. The retailers with physical stores and brands should be on their way to set up an engaging & hassle-free shopping experience in 2022 & beyond.”
– Devansh Shah, Lead Business Analyst, Krish

Summarizing

With cutting-edge technologies making rounds, we are looking at a future that is not only customer-centric but merchant-centric too. Gone are the days when scaling businesses was a matter of complete tech stack alteration. The future of commerce is connected, CX-focussed, and composable, and the latest tech stack equates the weightage on experimentation and consistent customer experience.

A special shoutout to all the industry experts to take out time and share their thoughts on the eCommerce trends 2022. We thank you for being such a spot and sharing your valuable insights on the subject.

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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.

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