With new technology, you can fill gaps in your strategy, provide features that elevate the customer experience and make shoppers eager to interact with your brand. Essentially, you’ll be able to set up your brand for higher growth.

If you aren’t sure how to adopt innovative functionalities within your e-commerce strategy, we’ll help! Here are 5 new technologies that leading ecommerce brands are adopting:

1. Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics looks at browsing and buying patterns to identify opportunities and threats to your e-commerce store’s sales. The insights that your predictive analytics provides can allow you to plan your marketing better (without any guesswork), identify which products you should push, and maximize your growth.

For instance, if a fashion brand used predictive analytics, they can very quickly identify their most profitable audiences on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. And they can use these learnings to launch high performing campaigns via ad platforms like Facebook and Google.

Alavi.ai is one such digital marketing management platform with predictive analytics that is built to help brands predict high converting audiences and optimize marketing campaigns. By launching campaigns that target the right audiences brands can improve metrics like their return on ad spend, cost per acquisition and average order values and grow and scale profitably online.

Read how e-commerce brands have successfully used predictive analytics with Alavi.ai.

2. Voice Search

With the rise of Alexa and other smart speakers, voice search has become very common. Research suggests that around 71% of consumers prefer to use voice searches over typing, the traditional method of inputting a query. In fact, voice plays an important role in online shopping. Around 37% of consumers use voice devices to search for products while 28% of consumers use it to purchase products.

E-commerce brands need to prioritize voice search and embed the tech into their on-site experience. There are 2 ways to make your e-commerce website more compatible for voice search:

1. Do voice search SEO where, with the right keywords, you can improve the rank of your website for voice search. Here’s how voice search SEO works and how you can implement it on your e-commerce site.
2. Allow visitors on your site to search for products using voice. You can do this by providing speech-to-text functionality next to your search bar.

3. Visual Search

Ever wanted to buy a product online but didn’t know how to describe it? Visual search is one of the best ways for online consumers to buy the exact products they want. It uses artificial intelligence to identify the object in the picture as well as features within it and sends back results that match the image that was uploaded by the searcher.

With 36% of consumers having used visual search, it’s crucial to optimize your website for visual search experiences. In fact, brands that redesign their website to support visual search will see a 30% increase in revenue.

Just like voice search, you can make your e-commerce site visual search-friendly by enabling your shoppers to upload images to your site search. Read how you can set up visual search on your e-commerce store.

For instance, Fashion Nova is a leading fast-fashion brand with thousands of products in their catalogue. Shoppers would have a hard time finding the exact item they want if they had to describe it using common keywords only. But, by uploading an image within a visual search bar, shoppers can find products with the exact type, color, cut, sleeve length, etc., that they have in mind. Visual search could potentially help brands increase their checkout rate exponentially.

4. Live Shopping

$60 billion in global sales— that’s how effective live shopping is!

Live shopping allows online shoppers to watch people try products in real-time and hear their honest opinions of those products before buying it themselves. By seeing another person try out the products, buyers are more likely to trust the brand, engage with it, and ultimately, they feel confident to buy it.

Live shopping is more interactive, and it entertains buyers, making them more likely to engage with the brand on a regular basis. If you’re looking to get started with live shopping, Instagram allows you to conduct live videos and pin links to the product catalogue for seamless shopping through the social media platform.

Larger e-commerce brands are increasingly hosting live shopping sessions within their native app. SHEIN, for instance, has a live shopping tab on their app. Shoppers can view top fashion influencers trying out different products that are on sale via the app. They can then view the list of products being featured in the live session and place an order immediately.

5. 3D Product Images

When buying products online, shoppers have a hard time understanding the exact size, colour and feel of the product . Many shoppers also have vastly different expectations when buying online and these variations could affect a brand’s online revenue, and that is where 3D modelled product images can play a positive role. 3D modelled product images can help buyers better understand products.

3D product images allow shoppers to see your products from every angle and even get a perspective of how the product looks in context, like in use or within a room. By displaying 3D product images, you can make it easier for shoppers to get a more realistic picture of the product you are selling, which will make them more confident to buy the produce and reduce return rates.

Besides just increasing sales, 3D product images also help brands rank highly on search since Google’s algorithm favors AR models when crawling the web. E-commerce platforms like Shopify recognized the need for these immersive experiences on their product pages and in 2020, started to provide support for 3D models on the product pages.

You can enable 3D modelled product images on your e-commerce site by following this beginner’s guide.

Provide Immersive Shopping Experiences and Increase Sales by Adopting New Technologies

The e-commerce space is constantly evolving, and by adopting the newest technologies, you can stand out within your industry, beat out your competitors, engage your store visitors better, and increase purchases on your site.

We hope this list helped you identify a few emerging technologies that can help you boost sales through your e-commerce store.

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