After the surge during COVID-19, ecommerce continues to grow and with the boom of AI, the landscape is evolving even faster. To stay ahead of the curve entrepreneurs need to constantly embrace and adapt to the changes. In this post, we will talk about the ecommerce trends for 2024&2025 and what it means for entrepreneurs.
2024 Ecommerce Trends You Should Know
1. Social Commerce – TikTok Shop
Social media has become an indispensable part of everyone’s life. On average, people spend around 2 hours and 23 minutes daily on social media, scrolling mindlessly through Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X (Twitter) and more. Women between 16-24 spend the most on average on social media, around 3 hours a day.
With the advancement of our technology and the increased usage of social media. Businesses and companies have adapted their strategies and focused on social media advertising over traditional marketing, as well as increasing brand exposure and reach organically. As shown by Statista, digital spending grew by 7.9 %, whereas traditional advertising spending decreased by 0.6 % in the United States in 2023. Many entrepreneurs have been successful in utilizing platforms such as Instagram or TikTok to introduce their products and build successful businesses.
In December 2023, TikTok introduced TikTok Shop and it has sold more than $1 billion worth of products. The reason why it is so successful is because it reduces the friction of visiting a website and purchasing a product and makes the whole process easier and faster.
Stephanie McNeal, a senior editor of Glamour shared her personal experience of TikTok Shop. She was just scrolling on TikTok and had no buying intention. She hadn’t even heard of the product before, but the whole buying process was so smooth and easy that she ended up purchasing the product.
Note: TikTok Shop is currently only available in selected countries.
What Does This Mean For Entrepreneurs?
Starting a business is easier than ever You don’t even need a website to start selling your products on TikTok Shop. You can test your products, do marketing with UGC content and let TikTok handle all the logistics part of the business, all in one app.
2. Livestream Shopping
Although the livestream e-commerce market in China is expected to reach 8.16 trillion yuan in 2026 ($1.12 trillion US dollars), the concept of livestream shopping remains unfamiliar to many outside of China. It first appeared in the 2010s, but a survey in 2022 shows that only one-third of the U.S. had heard of it.
What Is Livestream Shopping?
Livestream shopping refers to promoting and showcasing products through livestreams on social media platforms, with Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) being the one that is utilized the most. The host/hosts will introduce and promote a product, and the audience can ask questions or comment. The questions will be answered on the spot so customers can have a better idea of what they are purchasing for, and by weighing the pros and cons, they can make better-informed decisions to purchase the products.
How Successful Is Livestream Shopping In China?
Xiao Yang, a young Chinese entrepreneur, has built a multi-billion dollar company called Three Sheep Network by using livestream shopping as its core business model. The company is currently worth $118 billion yuan (around $14 billion US dollars). It has sold over $30 billion yuan ($4 billion US dollars) worth of products and the operating revenue of livestream shopping in 2023 was $1.5 billion yuan (Around $200 million US dollars).
Another Chinese live streamer, Zheng Xiang Xiang has a similar successful story.
She is the “3-second” lady who showcased thousands of products on a single livestream, each for just 3 seconds and generated over $14 million dollars in just a week. Her strategy is showcasing a vast array of products with unbeatable prices in a live stream.
Livestream shopping is starting to gain some traction in the West and it is rapidly growing. If you are a business owner, you should get on the trend and leverage the power of livestream shopping on social platforms to increase your sales.
3. Power of AI
If we want to talk about ecommerce trends, we must discuss AI. AI has revolutionized many industries including e-commerce. It has made every aspect of business effortless, more efficient and automated. From copywriting, and content creation, video creation and editing, to marketing, AI has allowed entrepreneurs to start and scale their businesses with less capital.
Creating A Clone With AI
If you didn’t know, there is an AI that can create a perfect clone of yourself, it’s called Heygen Ai. The AI clone of yourself does not only speak with your voice but can speak in over 40 languages.
It is a game changer for content creators and busy entrepreneurs. Sometimes you are not in a good mood, not in the desired environment to film a video, don’t have the expensive equipment to produce high-quality videos, or just don’t have enough time to mass-produce content. But with this AI tool, you can create a video with your clone anywhere and anytime you want, or ask your team to do it for you. It can help you scale your business and test your strategy faster and with less effort.
If you don’t wish to create an avatar of yourself, HeyGen Ai also offers over 120 avatars, 300 voices and 300 templates that you can use.
Watch this video of Danny Fortson and see if you can tell that the difference.
AIs Tools Are Replacing Copywriters
Copywriting is an essential part of e-commerce, whether you are writing captivating product descriptions, a blog post or trying to come up with the best captions for Instagram.
However, AI tools are taking over copywriters’ jobs. Benjamin Miller, a writer who led a team of more than 60 writers and editors for a tech company, told BBC that his team was replaced by ChatGpt. He no longer has to write authentic articles, his job is now making the articles created by ChatGpt sound more human.
Apart from that, an ad agency Blue Focus in China has laid off many of its copywriters and designers and replaced them with AI tools ChatGpt, and said that they would “indefinitely” replace them with AI.
Copywriting AI Tools Statistics
A copywriting AI tool, Copy AI grew from 380,000 users in Nov 2021 to over 10,000,000 users in March 2024. (Medium)
Another AI tool Jasper AI, founded in 2021 has a market valuation of 1.5 billion USD, over 70k paying customers, and projected revenue of $88 million this year. (Nikolaroza)
The rise of writing AI can be daunting to copywriters, marketers or writers, but it also presents opportunities. For entrepreneurs, the barriers of entry are lower, entrepreneurs do not need to excel in every aspect of businesses and AI can help save on initial hiring costs.
However, it also means that the market will be more competitive. Entrepreneurs must adapt and change their strategies, focusing on hiring individuals who not only have the skills and knowledge in a particular field but also understand prompt engineering.
AI Chatbots
Beyond copywriting, AI chatbots have also changed how businesses converse with customers. According to the statistics, although 62% of consumers prefer to be assisted by a human agent, 87.2% are fine or have positive experiences with AI chatbots. Additionally, 84% of companies believe that AI chatbots will be an essential part of a business in the future with the potential of reducing customer support costs by 30%.
It is needless to say AI chatbots will only get better and more human-like. Combined with their ability to provide solutions to customers 24/7 and at low costs, there’s a chance that they may take over customer service in the ecommerce space in the near future.
Product Photography
One other AI tool that can radically transform the e-commerce industry is Booth AI. Booth AI allows you to build your own AI solutions without much coding knowledge, but the best part is it helps you to create high-quality professional product photography.
You can upload your products, whether it’s furniture, clothes or skincare, and create the settings you want by inputting the prompt you desire and you will get the perfect product photography for your websites or campaign.
Upload your models and product photos and start creating.
Change the settings by giving a different prompt.
4. Mobile Commerce
People used to shop online on desktops but not anymore. As for the first quarter of 2024, smartphones account for 77% of retail traffic and two-thirds of online sales globally. Entrepreneurs understood the importance of this change, and now 1.71 billion websites (about 90% of all websites) are mobile-responsive.
Apart from that, people spent 100 billion hours on shopping apps like Shein and Temu in 2023. Temu, an online marketplace, launched only in Australia about a year ago, now has 11 million users and has become the fifth-largest online retail brand in Australia. Furthermore, this shopping app is also the most downloaded app in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K.
The same item is almost three times cheaper if purchased on Temu.
5. Voice Commerce – Purchase Products Online With Your Voice
If you are like me and didn’t know that you can shop online with your voice, now you do. Virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa can assist you in searching and purchasing a product without you having to touch your phone.
In 2021, the E-commerce transactions value was only 4.6 billion US dollars, but it went up by fourfold and increased to 19.4 billion US dollars in 2023, and is expected to reach $39.8 billion worldwide in 2024.
Entrepreneurs should adapt their SEO strategies and make sure their product descriptions are voice-search-friendly, such as using more conversational keywords, so they won’t miss out on potential sales.
6. Augmented Reality – Solving The Problem Many Have
“I am not sure if it will look good on me”.
Most people probably have this problem when they are shopping online, but augmented reality has provided a solution for all consumers.
Augmented reality is different from virtual reality in that virtual reality creates a completely different world, whereas augmented reality augments the real world by adding digital elements.
With Meta Quest 3 launched in October last year and Vision Pro in Feb this year, we started seeing people wearing Vision Pro on the streets. This trend suggests AR might soon be integrated into various aspects of our lives.
AR has a wide range of applications across many industries, such as gaming, education, retail, and marketing. The AR headsets and glasses market has a valuation of 2.4 billion US dollars in 2023.
AR in e-commerce is more common than we think:
- more than 32% of consumers are currently using AR while shopping (Intelivita)
- 40% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for a product if they could customize it in AR (Threekit)
- 57% of customers say AR will increase the likelihood of them purchasing a product from a brand (XR Today)
Conclusion
That concludes this post on ecommerce trends for 2024-2025. The e-commerce world is constantly changing and this can feel overwhelming. However, entrepreneurs can succeed by being flexible. Stay informed about new trends, and don’t be afraid to try new things and learn from them. The future of e-commerce is full of possibilities for those who can adapt.
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