Technologies like AI, VR/AR, Cryptocurrency, IoT will take center stage in 2020 and also form as the backbone of tomorrow’s ecommerce tech innovation. Beyond the sales and revenue focused world of ecommerce, 2020 ecommerce tech trends will provide the capability to create new software solutions, mobile apps, and services that will lead to creating a richer and more satisfying shopping experience.
To help companies enhance their digital experience management for their customers, here I’m going to discuss ecommerce tech trends 2020.
Let’s start reading:
How AI Impacts the Ecommerce Industry in 2020?
A survey report by Divante (the Ecommerce Software House) and Kantar (Data, Insight & Consulting Company) revealed that 37% of ecommerce developers believe that Artificial Intelligence is the technology that will be the trendiest of all in 2020.
Artificial Intelligence is already helping ecommerce businesses with chatbots, virtual assistants, recommendation engines, and warehouse automation. To predict future AI trends of ecommerce industry leaders are working hard and experimenting with present-day technologies.
Progressive brands are looking to reinvent in their ecommerce operations through digital experience management platforms like PIMCore (Product Information Management system), which is a PIM, DAM, CMS solution that provides a single place to manage your product information, create a product catalog, and distribute it across sales channels. It is also going to be one of the biggest trends of 2020 that offer a list of features for creating differentiated experiences:
- PIM supports data migration when re-platforming or expanding your business from B2B to B2C.
- Offer customization to adapt the structuring of your website catalog.
- PIM software localize your content by translating in several languages.
- Allow run your PIM in your own data center or via the Cloud technology.
- Maintain your web application on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Sotware-as-a-Service (SaaS) for easiest deployment option.
- Integrate easily with you current tech stack, your ERP system data, mobile apps, POS systems and other systems.
Interested in learning more about PIM solution? Click here to know more.
AI Robots, Chatbots, In-Store Tools & Drones
Notably, AI chatbots are a great way to enhance the admin and customer service interface of your store. For instance, Nike's conversational AI ecommerce chatbot allow users to mix and match shoe designs, create their own styles, and share with their friends all through a single chatbot. Ebay developed ShopBot, a shopping assistant that helps consumers to search and find the product they desire the time they want.
What these two are AI chatbot examples demonstrates is that the technology will lead to more engagement, and more customers lead to more sales. In 2020, you will observe a massive growth in the global artificial intelligence solutions for retailers.
For example, the AI-enabled 6 River Systems provides the best way to manage warehousing using robots for labor management, minimize walking, and reducing the risk of errors, and congestion. The warehousing and management tool built on AI tech, Google Cloud IoT solutions, Cloud IoT Core, Google Kubernetes Engine, and BigQuery on Google Cloud Platform.
The Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service for connecting, managing, and ingesting data from globally dispersed devices. The 6 River Systems uses vision machine learning to understand the warehouse environment that also help navigating around obstacles and making route optimizations.
AI-powered omnichannel personalization tool like Vue.ai understands every user’s shopping preferences, and tailors their journeys right from the home page of your ecommerce website to a particular web page. The tool help you digitally map and extract catalog data, and help you marketing product and get actionable insights to drive conversion rates. Using the capabilities of image recognition and data science, the Vue.ai tool create best of a kind retail experience for shoppers and also translate product information into different languages.
AI drones are at the forefront of the ecommerce tech revolution. May tech savvy retailers have realized the advantage of drones and started to see how drones can be extremely important in bringing about innovation and enhancing customer experience. The best thing about the drone system is the ML recognition ability that recognize products “in place” as it moves along. Also, an important part of the recognition is the “AI system” that learns how the shelf is organized by looking at how it changes over time.
On June 5, 2019, CBS News published a report on Amazon’s new electric delivery drone that states, drone is designed to ferry light packages to customers homes in less time. Amazon’s tech team also shared that the drone uses AI and ML recognition to fly and avoid obstacles. No doubt, aerial drones are the best solution for big, bulky, and expensive robots that cannot avoid obstacles. From the air, drones can see almost anywhere from different angles to different aisles and situations in the store.
With that you can say AI and ML recognition are set to deploy in the retail stores. And this is how artificial intelligence is shaping the ecommerce tech landscape.
VR/AR The Bigger Part of Ecommerce Tech Trends 2020
In 2020, leveraging AR technology, consumers can use their smartphone cameras as a medium to see interactive digital scenes. Through VR and AR ecommerce stores can create 3D scenes that will bring products to life.
Let’s explore...
Projected AR Systems
Projected AR systems in 2020 tech trends will make use of machine vision technology, often combining the features of light cameras with 3D sensing systems and depth cameras. This will help in creating the form of AR with technology called projection mapping, where the projected image of a product is mapped onto the physical objects creating direct digital overlays. This way ecommerce businesses can create digital displays of their products to appear on any surface or object.
Projected AR has been made available on depth cameras such as Microsoft’s Kinect that is introduced as a game controller for the Xbox game system. Many more dedicated AR technologies such as Lightform, are beginning to appear.
The main advantages of projected AR are:
- Shared experiences
- Projection mapping onto real objects and surfaces
- Ability to integrate and adapt non-AR hardware
However, the projected AR technology requires emplacement in a specific location, and the environmental conditions on those locations needs to be carefully considered. Having said that, Projected AR technology has the potential in creating immersive AR experiences with a more real feel than smartphone or wearable AR devices.
Virtual Try-Ons and Mobile Collaborative Workflow
Online virtual try-on solutions are really needed in the fastest emerging world of ecommerce. In 2020, you can use revolutionary AR solutions such as facial recognition software, 2D to 3D imagery conversion, and Pupillary Distance (PD) measurement.
The best example of leveraging AR/VR try-on solutions is Nike’s shoe app that allows online shoppers to find the right shoe size without even visiting the physical store. Similarly, the famous shoe brand Gucci brand also release its virtual try-on solution to try their Ace Sneakers in real time.
Similar to virtual try-ons, mobile collaborative workflow solutions allow flexibility and engage users. They take you and your team beyond the four walls of the office.
Some benefits:
- When you have mobile collaboration apps in your ecommerce store, there's no restriction to location; you could be able to work from a remote location. Also, these apps keep your staff engaged with notifications and monitoring of sales graph.
- These collaboration apps also provide you with excellent instant messaging, group chats, emails, video calls, voice calls, screen sharing, and so on.
- You don't have to spend extra money on renting an office space. The collaborative software solutions drastically reduces the costs of the overall project.
- So, with all these benefits in mind, I am giving here the option of one of the best mobile collaboration tools to help your ecommerce business productivity, usability, and data management.
AppSheet
With a platform like AppSheet, you can create an app for your business and easily input data into your phone. The options are many for ecommerce businesses and you can easily create an app to capture data and share it with your team.
Instead of knowing how to code, for AppSheet you only need to connect to your data in the cloud stored in Dropbox, Google Drive, Office365, Box, Salesforce, or other databases. The platform helps you create an initial version of your app based on the data that you can customize based on a variety of features, view types,and the other UI/UX options. Depending on your developers coding skill level, you should have an app ready in a day or less.
There are two other ways to make productivity apps on AppSheet with no-code app platforms AppSheet Spec and AppSheet sample apps. You can also copy another app data, replace the data with yours, and customize it to your needs.
Cryptocurrency Still Important in 2020
Blockchain and cryptocurrency are the most common technologies right now, but in the future tech trends ecommerce industry going to be familiar with them. Eventually, the technology could have a huge impact on the way retailers conduct businesses and this impact is going to be so huge that ecommerce businesses have serious consideration for the cryptocurrency in 2020.
Bitcoin works as both currency and payment network, that help facilitate cross-border trade in the ecommerce industry. Adding Bitcoin to your ecommerce store also helps in payment localization that work as a payment option for retailers without adding any national entity to which you must remit a currency. From the buyers viewpoint, it always helps to offer multiple payment options in your ecommerce store.
As such, thousands currencies have been built on Bitcoin’s model, and these currencies creating a myriad of use cases for the eCommerce businesses.
Ripple, for example, is for cross-border remittance. It has a centralized platform rather than a blockchain-based system that means more than 100 ecommerce stores around the world can use the technology to confirm real-time transactions across borders.
No doubt, E-commerce is a billion dollar industry with numerous businesses pouring in every passing day. With the increasing need of virtual currency across the globe, the possibility of using cryptocurrency for ecommerce business will earn a lot in the coming year. With cryptocurrency the industry has every chance to set new paradigms in the global marketplace.
Application of IoT Ecommerce
The Internet of Things will be more prominent in 2020 as 5G, IoT and AI theser all will re-create the ecommerce world. Developers will also get to work on different IoT platforms. The new IoT innovations will include business-critical systems that are also called Network Function Virtualization (NFV) that will speed up how services are developed.
With a higher number of IoT devices out in the world, ecommerce industry will be enabled by quality networks that allow enabling remote transactions using drones and sensors that also securely transmit data.
And, 2020 ecommerce tech trends will be the beginning of this innovation journey. The IoT technology is here, and ecommerce companies looking to make it real.
Final Words
This list shows why people have lots of reasons to anticipate what 2020 will bring, especially concerning ecommerce tech trends 2020. And, the ideas shared here are only the start. As technology improves, so will the output that depend on it.
