Expert Answers
Sort by Date
Sort by Votes
Oct 30, 2013
I'll agree that NFC has potential to be big, however mobile e-commerce is huge right now. Not having a responsive e-commerce Website can be a big risk as customers may go to sites that either have a mobile app or a mobile friendly site.
Free shipping is another factor to consider in pricing your products. If you are up against the heavy hitter e-commerce sites (won't name them, they get enough press) then you have to offer incentives to bundle multiple products together to make your profit margin big enough to either include the shipping or be unique enough to be competitive.
Having social sharing tools embedded in your site so customers can let their friends know about your products helps, and if you can make the purchasing process seamless by having account logins/efficient, secure shopping cart process is also a vital requirement. Finding ways to give different views of your product like virtual tours of products is popular too.
Shopify.com/blog has a lot more pointers about ways to succeed at e-commerce. Shopify is a pretty hot trend in itself!
Nov 7, 2013
I think the question is rather wide. If you want to know about hot innovation and dont mind if it sells or not than for sure the answer is mobile. Everybody talks about it, very few make money with it and VC's love it.
I personally think hot innovation is what can be sold and is not adequatly addressed yet in the market. What do I mean?
1. Easy integration for the merchant. A lot of players in the market are far away from making it easy for the merchant to integrate into their billing solution. I haven't seen many solutions where I thought - that is nice and truely innovative.
2. A seamless checkout experience to the end customer. It is just shocking to see the payment pages integrated around the world. This is to me one of the main reasons why people are still scared to pay online.
3. Omnichannel solutions which truely bring all worlds (POS, Mobile and e-Comm) together. Those worlds are as of this moment not connected but selected companies work on solutions to offer all of them in one system. Someone mentioned this would already exist. I am pretty confident that there is only very few systems out there in the year 2013 which are capable to do this.
e-Commerce in 2013 is still way to complicated for many folks. Therefore my final answer to your question is: Simplicity. We need to make it simpler for merchants and for end customers and that would be innovation enough for the moment.
Nov 7, 2013
I was interested in what is not adequately addressed in the market yet, so thank you for the insight. The seamless checkout is a great point- you can't have an effective business if you make it difficult for people to give you their money!
Nov 7, 2013
Just picking up on the point that Falk makes. Ecommerce for a lot of small business and entrepreneurs is technically a challenge and involves a lot of time and money. The bigger ecommerce platforms are making it easier to setup and use. There is new innovative entrants like Gumroad and the company I work for www.Selz.com which have removed some of the steps and made it easy enough so that anyone can now sell online in minutes from any site and via social media. Both have removed the hassles and costs associated with obtaining payment gateways or merchant accounts. Plus the innovation from a technical perspective of Braintree and Stripe who have made the payments processing significantly easier for people to integrate into their sites, especially for subscription cloud based businesses. My guess is that it will continue to become easier.
Oct 28, 2013
I think PayPal have something interesting with their "PayPal Here" facility (https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader) as well as their "PayPal App" and "PayPal inStore App" (https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/m/mobile-apps). It may not be totally innovative, but these kinds of things require clout to deliver, and PayPal has plenty of that.
Second I think anything that involves NFC is hot. I like the concept of having an anonymous loyalty card - you're loyal to a group of shops in a part of town for example. You don't give up personal data, but still get the discounts because of your loyalty to an area rather than just one chain of stores.
The benefits for the card user is they get discounts based on how much they spend at those retailers who are in on the scheme, but giving up no personal information. This is my single most important and personal barrier to loyalty cards and why I don't use them.
However, by using gamification techniques to engage card users, I would see card users providing limited and controlled amounts of information, performing online surveys and of course spending money to earn 'points' which convert to discounts. The benefits to retailers is the card encourages loyalty without aggravating their customers or the cost of developing their own reward system restricted to just one chain of stores.
The idea acknowledges the importance of gamification in the design of the encouragements. It's an idea that needs work. I want the benefits of a loyalty card but I don't want to paint a target on my back for salespeople to abuse.
Nov 7, 2013
Clive, I've never heard of the concept of an anonymous loyalty card, but it's very interesting- I'll have to look into it! What are some of the benefits of that versus a traditional loyalty card?
Nov 7, 2013
Hi Carrie, you've probably never heard of them because it's an idea I came with just a few days ago. But I expect someone else has had the same idea somewhere else in the world :o(
I've extended my original posting to try to answer your question.
I'm always happy to discuss crazy new things.
BTW, nice website you have there Carrie.
Jan 1, 2020
One of the hottest trends in e-commerce right now is product schema. This structured markup allows search engines like Google and Bing to understand your product listing and add extra details in search results.
Cheers!
Dave
Oct 30, 2013
(1) Mobile.
(2) SEO is requiring more than the accepted frameworks out there, particularly with the Google algorithms, so content frameworks are being leveraged to handle that (such as Commerce Kickstart).
Nov 1, 2013
Mobile is definitely a huge trend right now. The rate that browser usage is growing is astonishing. In just 2 years it's gone from 7 to 17% (July 2013, source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Desktop_and_mobile_browser_usage). And even more people use apps. This trend will only continue to rise as the rest of the world starts using more mobile devices.
Oct 31, 2013
The innovation trend is omnichannel order execution that enables cross channel marketing and internationalization. m-commerce is another buzz word i used in the presentation i shared. Hope that helps.!
Oct 31, 2013
I'm not familiar with omnichannel order execution, can you expand upon what exactly it is and what it does?
Nov 4, 2013
Omnichannel Order Integration basically integrates the orders from different sources not just web into one system and then proceeds with the fulfillment process via 3PL, Warehouses etc whatever relevant. It sends the confirmation to the customer and also updates the components of the fulfillment channel. Here is a short presentation prepared by my marketing team. Hope it gives a bit more clarity. http://www.slideshare.net/groupfio2013/order-management-solution-by-group-fio
Nov 6, 2013
to be honest, "omnichannel order integration" is a new dressing for what was previously called integrated order processing or warehouse-based sales. It's not a particularly new concept (various chains have had integrated brick&mortar with mail sales for a long time) but some of the new technologies offer interesting and new approaches on how to integrate.
Nov 20, 2013
The following are the trending niches in eCommerce right now.
• Crowd funding
• Online marketplace for buying and selling products
• Freelancer
• Design Contest
• Micro jobs websites
• Daily deals and Coupons
If you want to step in any of these industries, then Agriya can help you out with their clone scripts.
Apr 5, 2018
Hello!
Today's technologies allow the use of several interesting solutions for electronic commerce. For example, if you sell something to a specific segment of your target audience, use Instagram.
Do not forget that for a successful business you need a website. This is your business card and clients from social networks will be able to see your seriousness. I recommend consulting specialists for advice: http://spdload.com
Apr 18, 2018
Monitoring eCommerce hot trends shouldn’t just be like a hobby. Each trend has to be analyzed and adopted in due course if it’s truly going to drive your eCommerce brand forward — otherwise, you run the serious risk of falling drastically behind your competition. If you wanna make your eCommerce respond to the latest trends, you can consult the guys from Masterseo.
Jan 5, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) and more so the nano 3D boom that according to the sci-techno sector should be on us by 2025. The AI will be more aligned to your question Carrie, but both should be on your radar. Lastly, cryptocurrencies are coming out of their infancy stage and corps like Facebook are about to launch their coin (Libra). The e-commerce sector needs to be ready to incorporate this into their daily practices.
Cheers,
John
Apr 18, 2018
e-commerce is the trending business nowadays. You can start with a small budget and expand it. Start with clothing item because clothes are in high demand. You can also visit https://appletechsupportnumber.net/ to get the best ideas about e-commerce.
Mar 2, 2020
Technology is changing rapidly and daily new trends are introduced. For eCommerce platform latest innovation is implementation of Product Schema that makes your website interface easier. If you are seeking any kind of guidance for your eCommerce store, you can contact SEO Toronto Company.
Mar 20, 2020
Google is now accepting review snippets in the search results and it's constantly adding and modifying this function. The more good reviews you get the higher your site gets on Google.
Thanks for the insight, Mark- I'll go check out Shopify right now! As for free shipping, that's always a topic worth discussing, with Amazon even reeling in some of their free shipping qualifications.