We, the human race, keep evolving and so does the customer within us. From hawking to shops, to Baazar to Malls and now e-commerce, selling has taken various shapes in its ever-evolving avatar. Its most recent avatar is e-commerce which is growing from strength to strength, of course with some bit of blending from all sides. Thanks to the rapidly evolving marketing insights supported by the changing and improving technology, e-commerce is growing and changing fast to keep pace with the changing time or rather changing the time itself, very often.
 
There are two sides to the emerging technology trends in e-commerce; one that is driven by the marketing insight and consumer needs and another which we develop with innovative applications of new technological advancements taken from other domains. Both have proved to be equally important in the advancements of e-commerce. Below are some of the trending technologies that are already making waves or will take prominence in the coming time.

Integrated E-commerce CRMs, not only helps join all the dots on everything around consumer and relationship managements facet, but also gives one central depositary of data and data-driven useful inferences to be used for marketing, targeting, inventory management, order fulfillment, dispatch, grievances’ addressing & management purposes. 

Gamification to boost sales is catching up fast. It not only makes shopping more fun, motivating, interactive, it also makes it a lot more gratifying. This is one of the more recently developed effective ways to keep the customers coming back to your e-commerce app.

Contextual and Programmatic Advertising uses data-sets to decide the type of content, target audience, timing of advertising and re-targeting, to lure more and more people to generate higher ROI. It’s so promising that social media brands are already revamping their designs to cater to this need

Augmented Reality for Product Visualization is one of the niche trends that will be the future of e-commerce. You would be able to shop virtually by ‘experiencing’ the product with help of AR, VR, and MR. iOS, Android, and Google have their handsets that support this, and the adoption of AR/VR-enabled smart devices will increase sharply, in the coming time. 

No codes are catching up fast as many mid-level and smaller brands can’t afford custom developed e-commerce platforms which is expensive and difficult to develop and maintain. It is easy, friendly, and affordable, all that an SME and Start-up want.

Multi-Cloud hosting gained momentum during the pandemic.  This futuristic cloud approach improves the benefit of cloud hosting while aligning various business aspects like security, interoperability, data access, and IT operations. In absence of robust and swift hosting, Amazon would lose $220,318.80 per minute of downtime while Costco.com would lose $11,082.00

Social payments is another technological trend that is making e-commerce businesses improve their ROIs, tremendously. This works like a digital bank account where a social media user can either buy products on the platforms or from the online retailers that offer such payment methods. It is in its early stage, but brands like PayPal, Apple pay, Google wallet, Facebook payments, Twitter Buy, etc are working on it and are sure to fill the gap more fruitfully. 

Headless and API-driven e-commerce allows continued innovation to e-commerce platforms, to be completely decoupled from the frontend presentation layer. Because of the flexibility on the backend, as well as the increased SEO, content marketing, and digital experience capabilities, more e-commerce organizations are using headless.

Shopping through Voice, personalized Chatbots, Cameras, barcodes, and images are going to gain a newfound customer base, especially because they cross the language barrier and complications arising due to that. 

Technology will keep evolving enabling newer and perhaps better trends as long as we, as consumers, keep asking for more and more from the e-commerce brands, platforms, and marketplaces. Keep watching this space for more trends to watch out for in the near future.