The marketing landscape is constantly evolving with new ecommerce trends and shifting consumer behavior trends. As we move into the new year 2024, let’s soak in some key trends that will inform your 2024 strategy and will help you maintain a competitive edge.
These ecommerce trends reflect the essence of what many thought leaders spell out as top technology, marketing and consumer behavior trends that shape the e-commerce landscape. Hence, critical to absorb these to ensure success for your DTC store.
1.Personalization at Scale and Predictive:
According to the Salesforce State of the Connected Consumer report, 65% of customers now expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. In 2024, brands are expected to consolidate their tech stack, so their tech stack is able to connect and talk seamlessly with each other – a key ecommerce trend increasingly critical for DTC growth.
Those technology tools and platforms that reduce manual workloads, automate repetitive tasks, and help harness zero and first party data into powerful insights through data mining and predictive technologies will increasingly be the choice of DTC stores. Additionally, tools that help reduce multiple synch requirements across platforms bringing together loyalty, subscription, rewards, reviews, UGC, email, text messaging, shipping and transactional order confirmations will be the preferred platform(s) of choice.
Personalization is a great way to help create hyper-personalized experiences that help guide customers to products they would most likely love based on their past buyer behavior, purchases and cross-channel engagement.
As personalized experiences get more powerful with more AI driving and harnessing technologies, those brands who don’t care to provide curated personalization will risk losing these customers and see them churn. This is a key ecommerce trend that will be embraced by brands looking to scale and grow sustainably and profitably via product and category expansion.
Learn more on how to create holiday magic for your DTC store here
2.AI at the center of everything: With an increasingly complex operating environment, DTC brands will need to optimize their tech stack faster and optimize for costs and impact to margins consistently. Brands will not only embrace AI to create images that match brand tonality but also to analyze customer purchase behavior and predict buyer intent to further streamline and optimize for performance leveraging first party data. Simply put, brands that embrace AI, will work smarter and gain scale and intelligence rapidly by harnessing the right datasets to build insights. This ecommerce trend is at the front and center of every action you take on your DTC store.
Using the right tools at the right time in the customer journey would help brands scale performance rapidly in comparison to those brands that don’t leverage these technologies at the right time.
This ecommerce trend signals for a need to optimize your DTC store’s martech stack quicker and faster than ever before to avoid opportunity cost and reduce churn.
3. Buy Now, Pay Later will gain more popularity: So, what is Buy Now, Pay Later?
A buy now, pay later plan is a loan offered to a customer at the point of sale so they can purchase merchandise on credit but without a credit card. Popular options include Shop Pay Installments from Shopify, Affirm, Afterpay, Sezzle, PayPal, and Klarna.
While credit cards still have a solid foothold BNPL programs managed by third-party credit specialists are becoming more popular and accessible. In fact, as many as 25% of Americans have used BNPL as an option, according to one survey.
Although merchants don’t get to charge interest on Buy Now, Pay Later they make up for it in increased sales volume
According to an Adobe Report 67% of consumers use BNPL on at least half of their online purchases, with 35% saying they use it “most of the time”.
Learn more about Buy Now Pay Later here. This ecommerce trend took a leap with the advent of Shop Pay and continues to drive growth.
Learn more about Adobe’s six ecommerce trends for 2024 here
4. The future online behavior will be led by Gen Z audiences
By 2027, there will be six generations of online shoppers. Gen Z has recently overtaken Millennials to be the largest, representing 2.5 billion people globally.
This ecommerce trend will increasingly begin to shape ecommerce marketing strategy from 2024-2027 and onwards.
These Gen Z digital natives have grown up with smartphones and tablets, and feel very comfortable with new technology, tools and digital devices. They spend at least 3 hours a day on a mobile device and upto 6 hours a day on social platforms. Their preferred channels are Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Future online behavior will be driven by these Gen Z audiences, who will in many ways be the forerunners of rapid technology adoption and shifting digital touchpoints and behavior.
5. Zero Party Data will become critical for Store Growth:
Zero-party data will be key to allow customers to share what they are looking for and send them relevant communication based on it. Zero-party data ultimately will help DTC brands build interactive quizzes with AI, drive product recommendations to the right people at the right time and product reviews often contain direct, honest assessments from customers, which are incredibly valuable and help both customers, friends, family, and businesses make informed decisions.
Learn more on Smarte Digital zero-party digital solutions here
With the gradual waning away of third party cookies and the impact of iOS17 and its link tracking protection (LTP) released – ecommerce entrepreneurs will increasingly need to lean on zero party and first party data to better personalize communication, target and engage their customers. This is a cornerstone ecommerce trend that will increasingly be witnessed on DTC stores across platforms such as Shopify, Big Commerce, Magento or Square etc.
Learn more about zero-party data, its benefits and use cases via the Octane AI Playbook here
6.Social Commerce will continue to rise:
Another ecommerce trend focuses on the rise of social media. According to global news wire, nearly 98% of online shoppers plan to make at least one purchase on social media, according to Sprout Social.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest allow for online shopping, and paid advertising campaigns on social media are increasingly gaining popularity. Therefore, it’s key that ecommerce businesses invest in social media on the right channels to meet their customers where they are. Social Commerce hence will continue to rise, with the rise of new platforms and technologies.
7. Brands and Retailers will thrive with Direct-To-Consumer
According to the future of commerce report 2024, the US is home to the world’s highest share of direct-to-consumer brands and DTC sites were the third most popular online purchase channels in 2023.
Brands of all shapes and sizes will embrace the DTC approach. In 2024, expect more brands to go DTC in an attempt to collect more zero-party data and drive more personalization and brand loyalty.
8. Subscription Commerce tied to loyalty and other perks will increasingly become an expectation
The global subscription e-commerce market was valued at US$96.61 billion in 2022. The market value is forecasted to grow to US$2419.69 billion by 2028. The market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of approx. 71% during the forecasted period of 2023-2028.
As margins come increasingly under pressure, subscription commerce will increasingly be adopted by DTC brands, to drive better predictable cash flow and protect margins. Tie subscription programs to loyalty programs and bring value back to subscription members.
Other perks such as early bird offers, free shipping on the first X orders building a strong community etc. To delve more into this significant ecommerce trend – learn more about Recharge’s state of subscription report here.
9.Customer Service will get direct: Social shopping will get more and more direct. A study by Intercom found that 60% of U.S. customers prefer businesses to communicate via text and DMs, and HubSpot’s consumer trends report showed a 45% year-over-year increase in social media users that have sent DMs to get customer service.
Adopting technologies and new processes that allow your customer service team to interact via DM or texting will be an essential strategy going into the new year.
10. Cross-Sell will get imperative to drive product adoption:
Retention is no longer just about repeat purchases, its also about product expansion and getting customers to try more products and categories. According to Yotpo, for DTC brands across verticals, the number of products per customer is 2.4 and this number is likely to grow in 2024 and beyond.
By launching personalized cross sell and upsell recommendations, brands can help potential customers discover new products and categories in their portfolio thus increasing AOV and customer lifetime value propelling growth and profitability for their store.
Learn more about ReBuy Engine here
11. Privacy and Transparency will be key to win customer trust:
While ecommerce customers want incredibly personalized experiences this is not what they want at the expense of data leaks and other poor data management practices.
Gartner expects that by the end of 2024, 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under privacy regulations. Meaning companies found in breach of compliance will face hefty fines and legal consequences.
Hence, Data privacy and transparency must be at the forefront of any personalization or CX strategy for e-commerce in 2024.
Everything will be focused on making customer experience frictionless throughout the customer journey.
Be it marketing technologies that focus on automating customer support, automate returns, build UGC, automate review generation and moderation, automate email marketing and text marketing – all tools and technologies would be focused on making customer experience frictionless through the entire point in the customer journey.
At Smarte Digital Inc. we offer irresistible Q5 holiday offers that will help you and your team get to a winning start in 2024. To know more, book a free 30 min introductory call with us at https://www.smartedigital.com/contact-us.
