eCommerce Trends for 2019 — What to invest in?
Every year we publish an eCommerce Trends report. We ask eCommerce Managers for their opinion’s on the most important trends observed in the market.
This year, we have involved 150 specialists. We have analyzed 70 trends and their impact on the eCommerce market. This report is to show what people are investing in, what is working and what is not, and what is delivering ROI.
Below you’ll find the most interesting insights from my point of view:
The US is no longer the center of the eCommere Universe
7 of the 10 biggest top retailers (revenue) are not from the US.
6 of the 10 most popular eCommerce websites (traffic) are not from the US
What’s the most important, this number has been growing every year for the last 6 years that we have analyzed it.
The Capital Market loves eCommerce again, especially the tech companies
This year we saw huge acquisitions on the tech side of the eCommerce field. Adobe bought Magento and Marketo. IBM Websphere Commerce was sold to HCL etc. Amazon has bought a smart doorbell company, Ring, for more than $1 billion. As new trends are emerging — headless, cloud, microservices, we see more and more new players entering the eCommerce tech market.
New eCommerce ideas are taking off, finally :)
We see in eCommerce that there is a lot about being consistent and just doing your job. For example, we see that startups in Fashion have tried and failed to build rental-fashion businesses. There were 3+ attempts which I remember. Finally, someone did it. Rent the Runway enables their users to rent clothing and is growing fast — with more than 9 million members and $100 million in revenue. But they needed 9+ years to crack it. This is just one of the examples where eCommerce is not an “overnight success eldorado” :)
We, at Divante, are quite good at predicting
For the third time in a row, our predictions were right! :)
Analysis of eCommerce Investments of 2018 showed that Content Marketing was the most important trend for business. This is something we put in last year’s report as a trend for 2018.
2019 — the year of the Data
It looks like 2019 will be the year when everyone will focus on data.
Big Data will be even more essential as it drives the high paced growth of other areas including Business Intelligence, Customer Relation Management, and Conversational Commerce. Wearables and IoT will be treated as important sources of data, and we also see that eCommerce managers will increase investments here.
ROI is high for Content Marketing and Big Data
Content Marketing, CRM and Big Data are the actions with the highest ROI in 2018.
It’s worth noting that these trends are also chosen as Top Trends to invest in for 2019.
Changes in investments goals
Personal Shopping, Customer Lifetime Value, Wearables are the trends that have grown the most compared to last year.
Interest in Serverless Architecture, Cryptocurrencies and GDPR have decreased by the highest percentage compared to last year, as many companies invested in Serverless and GDPR in 2018. Cryptocurrencies are losing popularity as we still don’t see any B2C killer apps.
Long-term: Voice + Data
In the long-term, Alexa and other Voice Interfaces, and Big Data are seen as the most impactful eCommerce trends of the next 5 years.
Big Picture — Trend Matrix
Mobile CRO
As mobile is becoming the new Internet, eCommerce Managers should put more focus on optimizing this sales channel. There is a yawning Mobile Gap when it comes to conversion rate on desktop vs. mobile.
