The online commerce sector is a fast moving market and one that strives to stay at the forefront of emerging technologies. This can make keeping track of, and integrating novel approaches into your own operations tricky. Fortunately, here we’re serving up a definitive rundown of all the top e-commerce trends to keep your eye on this year. From AI, to post-Twitter marketing, 2023 is certainly shaking up to be among the most disruptive the sector has seen in recent years.
LLM Integration
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard of ChatGPT, the Large Language Model (LLM) AI that has caused shockwaves across the tech industry thanks to its truly next-generation capabilities.
Providing an exhaustive rundown of what LLMs like it are, or why you should be paying attention to them, is beyond the scope of this article. But suffice to say, AI has now reached a level of sophistication that it must be reckoned with by businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve.
To take a mundane example of how LLMs will likely change the way we shop and procure goods online before long, one need only consider the nature of the current generation of AI chatbot assistants that are now commonplace on websites across all sectors. These are relatively simple AI models similar to Amazon’s Alexa, and are capable of fielding and responding to simple and limited queries.
These have already saved businesses millions of dollars by automating processes that previously required live operators, but when LLM-level chatbots come to replace them – which they will – far more could be achieved with a similar level of input.
Curated Recommendations
The impact of global e-commerce has markedly changed the way people shop for products in-person. High street stores now seek to prioritize customer experiences and insider expertise. In our modern world of algorithms, having a real human recommend a product to you is suddenly a novel and sale-able quality. When the world’s largest book store is Amazon, people are likely to head to their local independent bookstore in order to get curated recommendations on what to read next.
Of course, while there are facets to this that will remain the exclusive province of brick-and-mortar commerce, we are increasingly seeing a trend towards curated recommendations being sought out online.
Consider the Google Play Store for instance. This is Android’s answer to the Apple App Store, and is home to literally millions of different apps. There are various different ways that users can utilise the Play Store for discovery – from looking at the top-lists of highest grossing or most downloaded, or following the algorithmic suggestions based upon your previous activity.
Yet in spite of all this, the Play Store still prioritizes its ‘editor’s choice’ selection – a list of hand-picked apps highlighted by the editors of the catalog as being particularly note-worthy. Simply knowing these apps are being platformed for reasons outside of algorithmic number-crunching massively increases their perceived validity and worth in the eyes of Android users.
Elsewhere, i-gaming recommendation platform casinobonusca prides itself on delivering the best promotional offers for hand-picked online casinos to its users. With over 20,000 online casinos operating in 2023, having the assurance that you’re browsing a hand-selected list of the best available sends a valuable and powerful message to prospective patrons.
Post-Twitter Social Media Marketing
Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, over half of the advertisers working with Twitter left the platform citing concerns over Musk’s firing of in-house teams tasked with ensuring non-discriminatory practices and safeguarding on the platform. Since then, Twitter has gone from bad to worse, with a recent rebrand as X demonstrating that the Twitter we once knew and loved is truly no more.
In its place has sprung up a number of competitors looking to capture Twitter’s market share and ‘town square’ sensibility. From former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Social, to Substack Notes, and the federated platform Mastodon, everyone is casting around for the ‘next big thing’ in micro-blogging.
The most promising of these to date is thought to be Meta’s Threads, which launched on the 5th of July and quickly became the fastest growing social media network in history after garnering over 150 million users in just 5 days. Suffice to say, until the dust settles, brands ought to be hedging their bets by maintaining a presence on each of these contenders.
