2020: What is the Future of eCommerce for Fashion & Beauty

Any eCommerce fashion brand that wants to say on top should look ahead towards the future. What’s going to change in the next 3 years? What new technologies can fashion brands utilize to increase their bottom line, own their KPIs, and increase their reach?

Taking a look into the crystal ball can help you stay ahead of the pack. It can give your business the reach and drive it needs to continue to grow and expand.

Today, we’re going to look forward and examine upcoming trends that are set to disrupt the fashion space over the next few years. I’ll show you some of the new technologies and business models that you need to be keeping an eye on. Plus, you’ll see how each one is going to drastically change the eCommerce fashion industry.

 

 

Design + Branding

Up until early 2018, website and brand design was largely a cut-and-paste formula. Whether you were shopping for shoes, shirts, or watches, each site that you visited was saturated with containers, white-on-color with tons of negative space, littered with scroll-down menus, and plastered with Future(like) typography. The minimalist design movement had created formulaic design processes that every business was latching onto in force.

Of course, minimalist design was a great thing — removing unnecessary UI elements, reducing clutter, simplifying navigation, etc. But, during the process of removing the clutter, businesses were removing who they were.

Luckily, this trend is rapidly starting to change.

As branding becomes a critical differentiator for fashion brands, web design is positioning itself as the perfect space to express individuality. Sure, minimal design is still king, but brands are finding ways to maximize that minimalism.

Branding is all about creating a positive association in your customers’ minds. Your site design is the perfect place to start capturing emotion.

• Did you know that the colors that you display on your website can improve your brand recognition by up to 80%?
• Or, how about the fact that consistent visual brand representation increases your revenue by 23%?

Fashion is synonymous with aesthetics, and eCommerce fashion brands are starting to realize that their design elements play a massive role in the way that their brand is perceived.

Luckily, these changes have already started. But, we expect to see a branch off from the era-2016 over-minimalist design into a more mature, more specifically representative design process over the next few years.

 

 

Social Shopping

It’s no big secret that social media has a massive impact on eCommerce ROI. For fashion brands, leveraging influencers and displaying rich photos and video creatives on social media has become standardized, and we would be willing to bet that the majority of you have KPIs specifically related to social media campaigns.

Using social media as a branding element is one thing, but using social media as a shopping platform, that’s a whole different ballgame — a ballgame that it’s time to start practicing for.

• Earlier this year, Instagram dropped its own shopping feature.
• Meanwhile, 25% of all eCommerce brands are already leveraging Facebook to sell products.
• Snapchat’s new VR features is positioning itself to be a significant player for fashion brands. Gap has already created its changing room app, which gives shoppers the option to check out fits pre-purchase.
• Similarly, Sephora is using VR tech to show off makeup options.
• And, of course, Pinterest is still a major player in eCommerce selling — although some big brands are having negative experiences with their new buyable pins.

Of course, this introduces friction into the market. Which social media platform should you be putting your efforts towards?

Which platform will take the social shopping crown? Who knows! We do know that all of this competitive spirit is fueling some pretty exciting tech (like AR) that fashion brands are using to dominate sales in the meantime.

Machine Learning & the Cloud

AI, deep learning, natural language processing, digital neural networks — all of these deep learning powered technologies are already disrupting industries across the globe. But eCommerce is going to undergo the biggest evolution of them all.

Without getting too granular, the cloud’s ability to store massive amounts of data mixed with deep learnings ability to accrue data from prospects is going to create a relative cornucopia of data — like 163 zettabytes.

Let’s paint the picture.

Jenny is walking down the street talking to her friend on her iPhone X4. Suddenly, she steps in a puddle and gets her shoes dirty. Her phone alerts her that one of her favorite pairs of shoes (using browsing history and purchase patterns) is on sale. Boom! Shoes sold.

From geolocational data to beacon data, the future of data is massive for eCommerce brands.

This isn’t even taking IoT devices into account. IoT can deliver hyper-granular data points (in the trillions) to sophisticated algorithms that can target rich prospects at the perfect time-and-place and drive them to the best nearby shopping channel. Of course, seeing as how 4 out every 10 purchases are already made using only online channels, that nearby shopping will almost certainly be a digital destination.

 

 

Chatbots

To say that chatbots are going to be dominant in the future is a misnomer — they’re dominant today.

• 85% of customer interactions won’t involve a human by 2020 (1 year from now!), we can get a clearer picture of just how crucial leveraging chatbots is becoming.
• 60% of customers already prefer talking to chatbots. They’re easier, instantly available, and always on-the-clock.
• 100,000 chatbots are answering 2 billion messages monthly on Facebook Messenger

The future of chatbots is already here. We don’t expect this trend to turn around any time soon. Over the next several years, we’ll see chatbots getting more sophisticated and better able to help humans navigate sites. More companies will begin using them and you’ll need to make sure that you’re one of them.

Final Thoughts

The future of eCommerce is tightly bound to technology and design, both of which are already an integral part of eCommerce’s DNA. Staying up-to-date with current industry trends will help your business stay in front of the line.

Don’t let your competitors outpace you. Stay connected, stay informed, and stay busy. The future isn’t too far away.

We have a pretty incredible team of strategists and designers who are willing, capable, and ready to help you showcase your fashion goods utilizing the latest-and-greatest design models and lightning fast Shopify eCommerce technology.

Want some help? Contact us. Want to see our amazing work? Check it out.