2019 was a challenging year for retail sectors due to technological and consumer behaviour changes. In addition to those, the uncertainty of Brexit, increased international competition.
“Innovation for engagement will continue to drive retailers’ priorities in 2020, and with this in mind, our talented team of digital commerce practitioners have outlined the key trends we see impacting eCommerce agendas in 2020,” said CEO of Tryzens, Andy Burton.
Contextual commerce
This refers to commerce’s cues that appear seamlessly in everyday activities and places. It also includes pop up stores, as we’ve seen through the likes of Amazon’s ‘Clicks and Mortar’ pop-ups last year.
Simplifying the way in which products are found e.g. using voice and image search, natural language processing and social selling to ensure the right product has been found.
Sustainable at the core
Digital commerce provides the means to effectively showcase and explain the brand/retailers mission and mandate for a greener world.
According to data from an upcoming Customer Insight Report from Tryzens, 84% of consumers expect brands they shop with to have sustainable practices and 83% expect sustainable packaging.
Componentised commerce
‘Headless commerce’ or ‘API-enabled’ commerce, places the focus on a technical architecture driving reusability of common capabilities, time to market benefits of changes, transactional scalability, efficient launch of new channels etc.
This allows retailers to integrate a wide variety of social, visual and in-store digital touchpoints.
Over time, this means that retailers can be much more agile to adapt to changing consumer trends and behaviours and can quickly implement contextual commerce add-ons.
The advance of payment preference
To help maximise customer engagement and sales success, retailers need to align with more innovative payment methods.
The Tryzens Customer Insight Report found ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ (BNPL) option to already be the fourth most preferred payment method, after PayPal, then credit card and debit card.
“The overarching theme running throughout all of these trends is keeping the customer at the heart of everything a retailer does; from recognising how they want to shop, to managing them across multiple channels, to demonstrating a commitment to sustainability, and to enable them to purchase through their trusted payment services. Those retailers recognising this and implementing the right technologies to enable these experiences will be the ones we see come out on top in 2020,” concluded Mr Burton.
