M-commerce controls 73% of the global e-commerce market share, and over the last six months, 79% of people used their mobile devices for online purchases. The unabated growth of this sector was well captured by Thomas Husson, Vice President, and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research when he mentioned:
“Mobile is becoming not only the new digital hub, but also the bridge to the physical world. That’s why mobile will affect more than just your digital operations — it will transform your entire business.“
The stats that I shared above proves that customers’ buying behavior has changed over the years with smartphones influencing our daily habits. Needless to say, mobile commerce will thrive in the future.
But, what mobile commerce trends will dominate in 2022? As an e-commerce business owner, you need to stay updated with the latest ones.
Don’t worry! This blog will highlight just that. It will help you prepare and adapt accordingly for the current year.
Trend No 1: Smartphones Would Trump Tablets in Sales
Customers aren’t just browsing through their apps; they are purchasing from them. The order value is $102 from a mobile app, whereas it’s $92 from a mobile website.
Katy Halewood, Head of Maxus for Business, was quoted saying:
“The mobile device has become our communications hub, our diary, our entertainment portal, our primary source of media consumption, our wallet and our gateway to real-time information tailored to our needs. The revolution is now!”
As mobile apps and sites can be accessed from multiple devices such as smartphones and tablets, it’s ideal to target both devices in terms of ads and promotions.
Notwithstanding what we term as ideal, as per business insider report smartphones are dominating the market.
The above graph shows the wider market share that the smartphones occupy as opposed to tablets despite the checkout difficulties faced by the former. By the end of 2022, it’s speculated that $276.1 billion mobile commerce sales will come from smartphones compared to $48.1 billion from tablets.
So, as an e-commerce business owner, communication with your customers should be done more through smartphones over tablets. The reason being, let’s say that you want to send promotional offers to the customers from your app. Rest assured, they would see the message instantly from their smartphone through notifications. But the same won’t be the case in a tablet.
Now the question is: Should tablet users be ignored? No! But, your primary target for m-commerce apps should be smartphone users in 2022.
Trend No 2: Social Commerce
Brands have been using social media to connect with their target audience, and I am sure you are doing the same.
Social media has many benefits, but it has always been challenging for businesses to convert their traffic into sales. Navigating from a social post to the product page entails too much friction.
But, social commerce has been evolving with the introduction of shoppable Facebook pages and Instagram shoppable posts. Now, customers can directly purchase products that they see on social media.
Businesses can tag their products in posts, which customers can click and purchase directly. They won’t have to open a new browser, navigate to your website and search for the product independently.
Social commerce gets rid of pain points in the conversion process. It’s easier to reach your customers directly on social media instead of relying on them to navigate their way to your website.
As your customers are already using Instagram, you can take advantage of shoppable posts. A recent study suggests that brands have benefited from a 1,416% traffic boost and a 20% increase in revenue by using Instagram shopping.
Shoppable posts are new but will continue to trend upward in 2022 as more brands catch on.
Case Study: Teeth-whitening brand Zimba experimented with Facebook Shops to boost its sales.
And it worked so much more than they expected. Zimba saw 1,200 gradual orders via shops, and the average order value from Shop buyers was 6.7% higher than those who purchased through its website.
Joseph Trebitz, Zimba’s CMO, was quoted as saying:
“Shops quickly represented over 5% of our daily orders once we activated. By sometime [in 2021], we’re expecting Shops to be capable of driving as much business
as our website, allowing us to scale our business and plan for aggressive hiring.”
Onboarding Process for Newbie Entrepreneurs Targeting Social Commerce
To get started with social commerce, ensure your products are shoppable on different platforms. Your team should be familiar with social shopping features on every platform your brand intends to have a presence. Plus, keep up with social media news outlets and take advantage of the latest shopping trends.
Additionally, here is what you need to keep in mind:
- Lower-priced items sell better
- Create an automated bot checkout
- Integrate social commerce into your e-commerce platform
- Partner with influencers to boost your social commerce sales
Trend No 3: Voice Shopping
Siri and Alexa have grown in popularity in recent years. Also, the way voice search is being used has changed as well.
Voice search has made its way into the e-commerce market. Voice shopping is poised to hit $40 billion in the current year. It was $2 billion in 2018, so that’s a 1,900% increase in four years.
40% of adults make use of voice search once per day. 20% of all searches on mobile devices are voice-based. It’s safe to say that voice search will significantly impact mobile commerce.
Case study: Invoked Apps allow users to play ambient sounds. They have some of the most popular Alexa skills in the skills store, which daily attracts more than 150,000 users.
Amazon launched In-skill purchases (ISPs) for Alexa, which allowed developers to sell digital goods through their Alexa Skills.
Nick Schwab, the founder of the Invoked Apps, launched ISPs in his skills. It allowed users to pay for premium features.
Nick revealed that he observed a 3% conversion for users. The conversion from trial to paid is 90%, which is enormous.
Onboarding Process for Newbie Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Targeting Voice Shopping
Before incorporating voice search, ensure that your website is well-optimized. Also, make your mobile app voice shopping friendly by incorporating UI features such as visual cues, custom branded wake word,voice to text transcriptions, listening screen, spoken and visual responses, processing signal, and prompts to guide search and filtering.
Trend No 4: One-Click Ordering
Shopping from apps will streamline the checkout process in 2022. Previously, it used to ask a lot of information from the customer like:
- Customer name
- Credit card number
- Credit card expiration
- Card verification number
- Shipping address
- Billing address
- Email address
It feels tedious to manually enter information each time during an online purchase. No wonder that shopping cart abandonment rates are so high from mobile websites.
97% of shopping carts are abandoned on mobile websites, whereas mobile apps’ abandonment rate is only 20%.
What’s the reason behind this? A mobile e-commerce app allows customers to save their information on the user profile. So, it eliminates manually adding the details during the purchase.
One-click ordering allows customers to complete their purchase in one click. It’s an easy win for both e-commerce business owners and their customers.
For owners, their conversions will skyrocket. For customers, it removes the pain points by streamlining the entire process.
Case Study: Amazon introduced one-click buying in 2000 to get rid of the typical shopping cart and allow customers to make purchases with one click.
One-click encourages impulse buying. As per CNBC, Americans spend $5400 every year on impulse buying.
Amazon’s patent expired on September 12. Soon, many retailers may offer the service.
Onboarding Process for Newbie Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Targeting One-Click Ordering
Encourage your customers to create accounts as repeat buyers to take advantage of the 1-click checkout flow. Don’t keep anything hidden.
Consider the information that a consumer looks for when making a purchase. The vital information includes expected arrival date and specific shipping cost. Provide the consumers with a particular date the item will arrive.
It will push customers to purchase within a particular time limit to get the item for a specific delivery date.
Provide self-service customer support tools like a 15-minute window to login into their account and cancel or modify their orders.
One-click ordering eliminates the checkout process. As time goes by, more e-commerce businesses will implement this technology. It would be best if you did this too.
Trend No 5: Shopping Via Mobile Apps
57% of US Customers used a mobile app to learn about a product.
Here is what Shopify CEO Toby Lutke was quoted saying regarding m-commerce:
“One of the most interesting lessons we learned this year–very fast–was mobile. Last year leading up to Christmas, about 5% of sales were from mobile phones. The week after Christmas, they were already up to 10%. We thought this was absolutely incredible”
Instead of an Internet browser, more US consumers used their mobile apps for their shopping needs.
Having a mobile-optimized e-commerce website isn’t enough in 2022. You need a mobile shopping app too.
85% of customers prefer mobile apps to mobile websites. They convert at a higher rate than mobile websites.
Case study: Amazon had set its sight of mobile commerce long before any of its competitors thought about it.
Approximately 42% of Amazon’s smartphone visits come from its mobile app. The rest consists of the website visit. As per the Internet Retailer, the app users make up 85% of the mobile time spent on Amazon.
Business Insider states that Amazon’s mobile app users are great targets for mobile conversion. Users have spent 12.8 billion minutes per month using Amazon’s app.
Onboarding Process for Newbie Entrepreneurs Targeting Mobile Apps
Use platforms like Appy Pie and Appery to build your app without the need for coding. And in case you are assuming that no code applications are meant only for simple apps, then nothing can be further from the truth. Currently, no-code application builders have evolved to support rich functionality in all apps. If you are taking the traditional route of hiring a mobile app development company, the app developers may make use of one or all the onboarding features such as Feature Promotion, Customization and Instructions to orient the app customers.
Trend No 6: VR & AR
VR and AR are popular in the tech space, and their use cases present endless opportunities.
Mobile shopping apps have started using AR to provide a better shopping experience. Furniture businesses can use AR to show how their product will look in a customer’s home. People can select a color and check if the furniture will fit their desired place.
Without AR, customers are forced to purchase with trial and error, which is not good. What if someone buys a couch or table online and finds out that it doesn’t fit in their chosen place.
The AR and VR industry is predicted to reach $35 billion.
Another example of AR benefiting customers: Imagine a customer likes to purchase a shirt from your e-commerce website but isn’t aware of his measurement. In such cases the shop owners can make use of AR to measure them and recommend the ideal fit. AR even lets you customize orders based on the person’s exact dimensions like a virtual tailor.
Onboarding Process for Newbie Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Targeting AR and VR
Create virtual showrooms and let users explore them. It will allow customers to visualize your products virtually, creating an immersive experience.
Trend No 7: Mobile Payments
Mobile wallets have become popular in recent years, just like online and in-store purchases.
When talking about mobile payments, Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe said:
“Stripe makes it easy for anyone, be it an individual or a small business or a large business, to accept credit card payments on the Internet. We want to give control to the user or the business to define what the experience looks like. We work on a website or a mobile app, or whatever between that”
Customers use Apple Pay or Android Pay to checkout when shopping from a mobile app. It’s quick, safe, and secure. They are also using these at brick-and-mortar shops due to their touchless pay capabilities.
Even wearables, like the Apple watch, can facilitate mobile wallet payments.
As per Statista, mobile payment volume is growing at 62% annually.
Onboarding Process for Newbie Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Targeting Mobile Payments
Integrate mobile wallets within your brand app which allows both online and offline customers to use their preferred payment method for purchase. It’s a fast and safe way to conduct transactions online and offline. Shoppers no longer have to carry wallets and bank cards due to the QR codes’ cashless payments.
Wrapping Things Up
Mobile trends will play an essential role in the e-commerce industry in the future. Keep an eye on them and plan accordingly.
Build a mobile app for your e-commerce website if you haven’t already. Customers will increasingly prefer it to shop in 2022. Ensure that the application integrates well.
These trends that we have shared in this blog will guide you in dominating mobile commerce in 2022.
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