Final part of our series on marketplaces. To wrap up this series, let’s focus on the trends shaping today’s - and tomorrow’s - e-commerce. A marketplace is, above all, an online retail site and, as such, must keep pace with - or even anticipate—industry shifts. New buying behaviors, mobile usage, social commerce, voice search, advanced personalization: marketplaces have no choice but to embrace these trends if they want to remain relevant, efficient, and aligned with consumer expectations. Here's an overview of the key areas they cannot afford to overlook.
Evolve alongside e-commerce
The marketplace model is above all an e-commerce site and it has to follow the same evolution. All the variations of online sales on new channels or new modes of interaction obviously apply to marketplaces, if they want to respond to new consumer behaviours:
Social influence and conversion:
The influence of social networks on e-commerce has been strengthened over the past two years. Consumers are inspired and informed by – and buy through – Instagram and Facebook, which have developed their own marketplace and launched features that facilitate live shopping. Snapchat and TikTok have also joined in, taking advantage of the capabilities of mobile. Social shopping is a sales method that marketplaces must not ignore. They can also develop their own communities, as ManoMano has done, to strengthen customer loyalty.
The passion for local produce will continue:
Consumers are more aware of their carbon footprint, and they also want to support local suppliers. This trend developed further during lockdown, when many local initiatives were launched to allow retailers to continue to sell. It’s in the interest of the marketplace to take this trend into account when selecting suppliers.
Voice mode opens up new possibilities:
With personal assistants who invite themselves into our homes, creating shopping lists or placing an order can be done without opening our PC or mobile phone. We have been able to place an order via a Google assistant with Fnac for the past three years. On e-commerce sites, voice search is integrated into search engines and will quickly be enriched with AI that is capable of recognising emotions and using them to personalise responses. It is perfectly suited to mobile use and corresponds to the consumer’s need for an instant result (dictating a request is four times faster than typing it).
Omnichannel is the norm:
With the pandemic, consumers have become more omnichannel than ever. They use their smartphones more often, make purchases during “micro moments” throughout the day and appreciate being able to interrupt the process and resume it on another device. New delivery methods have also developed to meet the needs of customers in any situation. Marketplaces have to think “mobile first” and learn from shop opening experiments, like Amazon or Cdiscount, which benefits from the network of its shareholder Casino.
An abundance of product offerings and customer impatience are not a good mix. To respect the customer’s need for instantaneous results, marketplaces have every interest in taking care over the search phase in the purchasing journey.
Faceted navigation is not necessarily a panacea. When searching for a product, customers instinctively use the search engine first, because the list of filtered items is often very long and, for some filters, the list of choices is endless. If you try to select a brand on Vestiaire Collective, you’ll be struck by the length of the page.
When increasing the number of categories, the marketplace will also have to adapt its approach to faceted search. It must also take into account more criteria to rank sellers who offer the same product. At Cdiscount, for example, which now has 100 million products in its catalogue, an algorithm was created by data scientists to list products in five categories based on reviews, descriptions, photos, price and sales. Amazon on the other hand ranks products according to seller performance, comments, product availability and delivery options. Leroy Merlin takes into account sales, but also the rate of items being placed in baskets, to put forward those products which are less visible but which generate sales when they are seen.
It’s not easy to find a magic recipe for a relevant system. But shouldn’t we also be taking an interest in customer behavior to show results that are more likely to please them?
What studies show is that the search engine is not only the entry point into the site, it is also an increasingly used tool for searching for products. It is therefore essential to use all the capabilities of this engine to improve the customer’s experience.
Personalization is a widely used tactic on e-commerce sites and it is expected by customers. 73% want a more personalized buying experience. An offer customized for the customer, displayed on the homepage, taking into account their purchasing habits, saves them time and shows that the site is anxious to please them. On a marketplace, the growth of the product offering brings more visits and therefore increases the amount of information that can be processed to refine this personalization. It’s an opportunity waiting to be seized.
But it’s possible to go further, to succeed in individualizing the results for each customer. This ultra-personalisation is a differentiating factor for a marketplace. A welcome page or a search engine that understands how to take into account the customer’s navigation, their previous choices and their overall behaviour can suggest truly relevant products, which are a great help to the customer in their selection process, which is more complex on a marketplace. This is a factor in the growth of sales and customer loyalty.
But to achieve this, it is necessary to process huge volumes of data and interpret subtle signals. AI and machine learning can be used to automate these processes and apply the most effective algorithms.
OpinionWay
YouGov
IBM Institute for Business Value
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