E-commerce Trends 2024

What are the 2024 trends for e-commerce?

Voice search, dropshipping, artificial intelligence: online stores will be increasingly tech, increasingly responsive, but above all, increasingly important for retail.

If you’re considering opening an online store, here are the 2024 trends (useful, even if you already have one and want to optimize your revenue and increase sales).

E-commerce developments in 2024 are essential for the growth of online sales and technologies.

62% of Italians purchase on an e-commerce site, and this percentage seems destined to increase further.

In particular, the sectors which recorded a significant turnover in Italy during 2018 are:

• The “leisure time” category, with 41.3% of the total turnover.
• The tourism sector, with 28% of the turnover.
• Health and beauty increased by 23% thanks also to the presence of online pharmacies.

In 2019, growth was 18%, desktop browsing decreased (from 35.4 to 28.4 million unique users per month), while mobile was used monthly by 67% of the population. There are approximately 38 million online consumers, and it is expected that by 2025, they will reach 41 million, data that demonstrates how e-commerce is growing.

E-commerce is increasingly smart (phone)

In Italy, smartphones are used by consumers much more than in the rest of Europe: 85% of the web population uses mobile devices to make an online purchase, 34% use them often, and 14% always use them.

Those who shop online expect consistent and engaging shopping experiences, having access to the product through every possible digital channel, including smartphones.

For this reason, they demand and expect the transition from one channel to another to be smooth and hitch-free.

In short, mobile devices play an increasingly important role in online sales. In 2024, the share of consumers who rely on their smartphones for shopping will increase, clearly provided that e-commerce is structured in such a way as to allow a satisfying shopping experience.

Here are some tips for doing so:

• Coherence and visual clarity on the buttons: the most obvious and most sophisticated operations, therefore the calls to action “buy”, “more info”, “prices”, etc. must be highlighted, both with suitable colours and fonts and in the text itself ;
• Simple and fast payment: to facilitate the purchase, the payment steps must be few to speed up the time and speed up the transition between searching for information and payment;
• Responsive design (it’s been talked about for a long time): the graphic layout must take into account the dimensions of the different devices with the respective navigation differences between the various iOS, Android, Windows and desktop systems;
• Mobile page speed: pages must load quickly, so all media uploaded to the online store must be lightweight, and e-commerce must use a dedicated server that significantly increases loading time;
• Chatbot for assistance: autonomous and always present virtual assistants, active 24 hours a day, can support the user, who with a smartphone is more predisposed to chat.

Next generation homepage

The homepage of an e-commerce site must be structured differently from that of a business site that does not include online purchasing.

If, in this last type of site, the elements present are usually fixed and attributable to company presentation boxes, in the case of e-commerce, the product must also be at the centre of this page.

The home page must condense the information that is useful for the purchasing process of potential customers, giving space to the reasons that should push the user to purchase, but above all, to the products in the catalogue.

Finally, if e-commerce involves social media used constantly and frequently, improving one’s online reputation by showing the latest posts could be functional.

This is why an e-commerce homepage must be dynamic and, therefore, present:

• The latest products are included in the catalogue with a short abstract of the technical datasheet.
• buttons to discover more product details and instant add-to-cart buttons
• presentation of payment and shipping methods
• latest social posts published in the various accounts to show activity and interaction generated with other users
• Use smart content that changes automatically depending on user navigation.
• Use recommended products retrieved by artificial intelligence.
• View related products if you are a user who has already purchased
• View products needed for previously purchased product categories
• Differentiate communications if you are a man, a woman, a user who has not landed for a long time, rather than a regular visitor.

Voice search and chatbots

65% of people aged 25 to 49 talk to their voice-enabled device at least once a day (PWC, 2019), and voice is expected to be a $40 billion channel by 2022.

With voice search, conversational marketing goes far beyond standard bots and chats, including an innovative element, the voice one, used to serve Customer Satisfaction and Customer Experience on the web.

In 2024, searches carried out online via voice search, i.e., dictating the request directly into the browser, will increase exponentially.

E-commerce cannot fail to consider this incredible change that is taking place among consumers, Millennials, and Generation Z, as well as all those discovering the convenience and usefulness of online research without typing.

All this translates into e-commerce indexing work, which must also consider those “long tail” phrases, i.e. the search phrases made by online users with many keywords.

Do SEO no longer on pairs of words without prepositions and with high competition (therefore less chance of being found because many are already positioning themselves for that search) but on more keywords with lower search volume (and higher conversion rate ), allows you to immediately attract those users who use exactly those phrases to do research.

Marketing automation

An e-commerce without a marketing automation strategy is an e-commerce that cannot take off.

All those operations that make brand-user communication automatic via email, chat and social media allow you to optimize contacts.

In 2024, this will be even more important.

There is an increase in tools that can combine CRM and marketing automation, such as Hubspot’s CRM, and the information that can be known about users.

Marketing automation-guided predictive lead will be standard by 2024, so you need to use marketing software that leverages machine learning to analyze all your data and determine how to evaluate different user behaviours.

UX, first and foremost

An e-commerce site, more than an average site, must be easy to use.

Developing it from a UI Design perspective means offering the user a pleasant interface, which allows them to quickly identify the contents (products) in just a few steps and complete a satisfying and memorable purchasing journey.

What does it mean to have an e-commerce UI?

• Allow users always to understand where they are through clearly visible graphic elements
• Ease of navigation thanks to the ability to go back at any time, cancel an action, fill out a form without difficulty or retrace the purchase phases without problems
• Correspondence with the target audience, using the same tone of voice
• Consistency between graphic elements and words with any navigation device, both desktop and mobile
• Simplification of actions for the user, inserting automation (such as automatic filling out of forms) or streamlining the steps (such as multiple choice questions instead of open-ended ones)
• Clean, minimalist and refined design of information and graphics

Dropshipping the 2024 trend

Dropshipping is becoming increasingly popular in Italy, too: it is a sales formula thanks to which e-commerce sells products without having them physically in stock.

In practice, he has yet to buy them, but he only sells them when there is demand. Dropshipping represents an advantageous supply channel.

In practice, it is a sort of affiliation to a parent company that supplies its products, which will, however, be held in the centralized warehouse, as are shipping and logistics, leaving the e-shop the sales task only.

In 2024, as we have seen, there will be several trends in user behaviour, which correspond to an increase in demand for online purchases.

More and more users purchase on e-commerce, not only on large recognized marketplaces but also on smaller stores.

They land on the latter if they recognize characteristics that lead them to trust the portal.

Clarity, transparency, ease of navigation and accessibility are the keywords for e-commerce in 2024!

Also Read : E-commerce Lead Generation: How To Use Funnels