5 E-Commerce Trends to Look Out for in 2023

E-commerce is evolving day in and day out and your customers know it. What was extraordinary yesterday is expected today and if your storefront can’t keep up, your clients will find another option that does. So, looking forward to 2023, what are the five biggest trends impacting your business and what are the nice-to-have things today, that might become the new norm in the years to come?

Margus Eha, CEO of Opus, noted that Opus believes that each and every e-commerce solution should be a perfect match for the needs of the business. However, sometimes you’ll need to think a couple of steps ahead – there’s no point in building something nice and shiny today, only for it to be outdated in a couple of months’ time. Knowing the trends and predicting market needs is what helps you stand out – and we’re here to help you decide what to focus on.

With this in mind, here are the biggest e-commerce trends to look out for going into the new year.

Mobile still comes first

It’s something we’ve been talking about for years, but it still holds true. Mobile is king in e-commerce. The vast majority of stores see the bulk of their revenue being generated from orders placed via mobile devices. If your store can’t play nice with mobile, you’re leaving money on the table and lots of disappointed customers in your wake.

Working well with mobile no longer means just having a scaled-down version of your main desktop site. It has become so much more. Not only needs the mobile site to offer an outstanding user experience, with every placement, text, and image optimized for the smaller screen, it’s becoming more important every day take advantage of the possibilities offered by mobile devices – be it AR-solutions, full-screen experiences, or something else entirely.

Today, most e-commerce designs should start with a mobile-first mindset. Want to know how we approach it? Get in touch!

Social media can make or break you

Social media and e-commerce go hand-in-hand, but no longer is just making regular feed posts enough. Broadly speaking, the main social media-related trends for 2023 can be divided into two: one related to marketing, and the other related to the shopping experience itself.

With marketing, influencers and influencer tracking are the main areas to focus on. This means that your e-commerce operations should be able to assign sales and traffic to a wide variety of sources, with the most common options being promo codes and special URLs. Today, some companies have also opted for fully automatic solutions, with influencers getting automatically paid, either via integrations with accounting or by assigning them vouchers or similar options.

With the shopping experience in mind, customers expect simplicity. We’re sure you’re no stranger to Facebook’s product tagging or retargeting with related ads, but 2023 is the year to turn the dial to 11. Most customers do not want to scroll through endless pages to find what they’re looking for – if they see something they like – no matter where it is – they want to click on it and get it. If your store and social channels are not yet set up for it, now is the time to change it.

Voice search is emerging

This is something more prevalent in English-speaking countries, but still worth noting. As mentioned before, people are looking for simplicity, and what can be easier than just telling a digital storefront what you’re after? If your site is targeting mostly majority-English-speaking markets, we highly recommend implementing voice search capabilities.

Video is making a comeback

Video comes and goes, but in 2023 it comes. Images are still important, but many successful stores have started to (re)implement video and nicely rendered 3D-overviews next to their products or service pages. Whilst not all products need videos to capture the customer’s imagination, more complex items can really benefit from it. Keep in mind that video can also be used on your social channels, so a one-time investment can serve you in multiple channels.

Most e-commerce platforms support video by default but do make sure your site and hosting providers can keep up with serving it.

Personalization is the key for winning

People like to feel important, there’s no question about that. This means that marketers have realized that utilizing a personalized approach to e-commerce is something that can really boost a business. There are a million different ways to personalize a shopping experience for a customer, so it’s important to figure out what works with your client base.

Personalization can be quite simple: marketing automation is the first step in that direction. Sending your customers offers that are tailor-made with their needs in mind is a lot more effective than just sending the same offer to your entire mailing list. However, to truly create well-functioning marketing automation solutions you need data and systems to make sense of that data, so do keep that in mind.

But personalization is not just about sending newsletters that are addressed to the customer, it is so much more. Many large brands have taken the approach to offer tailor-made websites based on their customers’ attributes: if you are a 30-year-old male visiting a clothing retailer’s web store then you’ll see products modeled by other 30-year-old males. If you are a 23-year-old female, then you’ll see products and models that best resemble you.

And then there’s also the middle-ground: the webstore the customer is visiting tries to understand who they are and show them the products they are most interested in. However, keep in mind that it’s not as simple as showing the person who has previously bought a frying pan more frying pans – they already bought one, so probably they’d now like to buy a spatula or some olive oil.

Want to see what e-commerce project we’ve completed recently? Check them out!