A few decades ago there was nothing called "e-commerce," and very few people could imagine a world in which we order things from a small, remote device and have it delivered to our doorstep. Things are much different now, though, and e-commerce is much bigger than many could have anticipated.
According to research by Deloitte, ecommerce is now so big that online commerce channels will be making holiday history during the 2016 holiday season -- more customers will be shopping online for gifts than ever before. Of the expected $1 trillion in holiday sales this year, about half of people shopping will be shopping online -- making the internet the number choice for most people who want to do holiday shopping. The same study forecasts a 17 - 19 percent increase in ecommerce sales during this holiday season.
It's also worth noting that the current number of people using the internet now is 3.5 billion -- an increase of over 1 billion people from about five years ago, and a number that will keeping going up. If available data is any indication, ecommerce adoption will also increase massively.
Thanks to ever evolving technology, there are some really smart ways to boost ecommerce sales. Here are a few ways to use technology to boost sales:
Cart Abandonment Software: While ecommerce is one of the best things that happened to the internet, it isn't without its risks. One of the major downsides of commerce online is cart abandonment -- and it's much higher than the rates obtainable offline. According to Baymard's study on cart abandonment (which is based on 34 other cart abandonment statistics), the average documented online cart abandonment rate is 68.82 percent -- in other words, 68.81 percent of people who add your product to their cart won't be purchasing from you.
The good news is that you can trust technology to solve the problem technology creates; there are now countless apps and software that automate following up with people who abandon their cart and that will help you recover a good portion of potentially lost sales.
Mobile Adoption and Optimization: People decide not to purchase -- or they simply abandon a purchase halfway -- online for so many reasons, but a major reason is that of distraction. In fact, research shows that a single second delay in your website speed will result in a 7 percent loss in conversion. This makes sense when we consider the fact that the average human attention span is rapidly declining.
It's not all so bad, though, thanks to mobile. Research shows that there are about 166.3 million mobile shoppers in the U.S. alone, and that many people are with their mobile device all day. A good portion of online sales are made with mobile devices, too, and the total number of mobile-only internet users has now exceeded the number of desktop-only internet users.
By optimizing your cart, checkout forms and buttons, payment processor and even your site and user experience for an increasingly growing mobile internet population, you will be able to record a significant boost in ecommerce sales and conversions.
Email Automation: Email marketing is one of the major things that have happened since the internet -- despite the advance of countless social networks and messaging platforms that have grown strongly and died with equal speed, email remains strong as usual. In fact, research shows that 2.5 million emails are sent every second. Many have declared email dead, but is it? Email is reported to be the most effective marketing channel, with the Direct Marketing Association releasing statistics that show that you can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. That's not all, but research shows that email was responsible for the highest number of 2015 Black Friday sales.
There's no doubt about the effectiveness of email, but how do you make the best of it? How has technology revolutionized email for ecommerce? Automation! According to data from Marketing Sherpa, you can boost conversions from email by a whopping 208 percent simply by sending automated emails -- based on personalized information and preferences/interests of your prospects -- compared to just sending a generic "batch-and-blast" email.
Thanks to advancement in email technology, you can segment subscribers based on location, occupation, pages they visited on your site, products they ordered, and many more. Even more importantly, advanced AI technology makes it very easy to send emails to people when they are actually more likely to open it -- this is by monitoring their reaction to your emails and across your sites -- leading to a massive boost in ecommerce conversions for you.
Marketing Automation: Another advantage of constantly improving technology is marketing automation, and this is impacting e-commerce sales more than ever. Gone are the days when you can only automate your marketing at an enterprise level -- there are now lots of simple tools (some even free!) that allow you to automate your marketing.
We've talked about email automation earlier, but you can also retarget to customers who visit your website or who performed certain actions on a particular web property.
Exactly how effective is marketing automation? Research by The Annuitas Group found that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects generate up to 451 percent more leads, while data from Nucleus Research found that marketing automation drives as much as 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity and up to 12.2 percent reduction in marketing overhead.
Conclusion
As you can see, e-commerce is much bigger than ever anticipated, and it will continue to grow at epic proportions thanks to continuous advancement in technology -- especially online technology. Make effective use of the above advance in technology in your ecommerce business and watch your sales grow.