Tendencies and Technologies for a Successful New Online Marketplace

In most part, such booming progress is due to the increasingly wide availability of online commerce services. People now can easily shop and order services via smartphones (with apps like Uber, Amazon, etc.). And over the last 5 years, this tendency has grown from 16.2% to 53.2% of total mobile traffic (which was measly 0.7% back in 2009).

This steady growth doesn't mean, however, that owners of online marketplaces and stores can sit back, relax, and watch the profits flow in on their own.

The market competition grows along with the sales numbers. In the struggle of keeping up-to-date and in demand, all market players without exception have to progress and adapt. That means adopting the latest, trendiest eCommerce solutions, both in terms of backend performance and frontend user-conversing powers.

The following eCommerce trends, in our opinion, will dominate (or continue dominating) the market in the nearest future and help you keep your customer audience motivated and engaged for at least a couple of upcoming business years.

As highly technologically-advanced and sci-fi-ish as it may seemed before, machine learning and artificial intelligence are pretty usual, widely-employed things nowadays. And their fast-paced evolution is a real wonder of modern science.

ML has given us neural networks that are able to self-educate and predict human tendencies, precise cancer diagnostics that beat the abilities of real doctors, semantic search that knows exactly what you're looking for, and more.

Even Uber is now launching an ML/AI-focused department - Uber AI Labs - to help optimize a number of logistics points in the service (like car-tracking and route prediction) and develop smart car software.

In technical terms, ML is a "parent" of all AI capabilities, training hardware to properly analyze all that it sees around and progressively collect the gained knowledge for better further performance. In the eCommerce realm, these powers are priceless.

In particular, AI-powered personalized search can help you better satisfy customers with relevant recommendations (like Netflix and websites similar to Etsy do) and predict their behavior patterns for efficient marketing campaigns; ML-based systems can help identify malicious interaction patterns and reinforce your store's security; even an improved setting and ranging of dynamic prices can be achieved via ML - as an on-demand platform, Airbnb uses ML-based analytics to predict certain bookings taking place at a certain price and time.

With all that being said, AI and ML should definitely take a special place in the heart every far-sighted eCommerce enthusiast out there.

Diving even deeper into the capabilities of modern AI, the deep learning (DL) powers are called for enabling it to make conscious, human-like decisions. The weird yet astounding computer vision is based just on this tech concept. All in all, it is a much more intricate implementation of ML/AI powers that requires massive data input and many complex configurations.

In online marketplace development, DL allows for progressive features such as voice recognition, advanced text and voice search, instant translation, and more. Such an advanced personalization, according to recent studies, can reduce bounce rates by as much as 45%. Moreover, these capabilities result in boosted search rankings, user conversions, and, particularly, customer support.

You may have already heard about chatbots. These increasingly popular smart virtual assistants help automate the support on any website so that users can clarify any details instantly at any time. And, reportedly, over 60% of customers prefer their simple questions instantly clarified by websites, apps, or chatbots at hand.

Amazon's Alexa is one prominent real-life example, which is, in essence, an advanced speech recognizing chatbot that responds to user requests.

Ultimately, DL can take your eCommerce a long way, helping position your business as reputable and truly client-oriented.

Initially being entertainment-focused tech implementations, both VR and AR have come a long way to also help enhance fields of medicine, education, and marketing. Virtual reality can immerse users in digitally-constructed environments of any shape, form, size, and purpose.

On the example of real estate implementations of VR, we can see how customer journeys can be made faster, more accessible, and more impressive overall. Virtual models of soon-to-be-built objects or existing remote objects can be explored in detail, which is a great push in your regular sales funnel advancement.

Then, there's AR which doesn't enwrap you wholly but gives you a layer of that virtual reality that you can put over the real-world background at will. Thus, you can see how various elements or visual changes may affect real environments right through your smartphone screen (for instance, how this or that IKEA piece of furniture would fit here or there in the house).

According to practice, about 35% of users claim that they'd rather shop via your marketplace app or website if you allow them to "try on" your products virtually. Both technologies offer awesome product familiarization for all potential customers out there who worry about buying shoes in the wrong size on the Internet.

When you create a marketplace website, user experience (UX) stands among the crucial pillars (along with design, UI, and performance) bearing the strength of your solution's total impact in the market. UX is how your eCommerce feels and these "feels" must be pleasant and inviting if you want lower bouncing rates and higher conversion rates.

Particularly, UX stands for how fast your pages load, how accessible the navigation is, how well your marketplace works on different platforms (include mobile OSs), and how your eCommerce satisfies users with its performance overall.

In essence, even small details tweaked and changed in your UI and UX can be a real game-changer for your business and boost sales by as much as 20%. That's why you should definitely be very attentive and insightful about how you present your online solution to the mass audience of users.

How to make a marketplace website that would grab a hold of users' attention with only one word that describes its underlying technology? Blockchain! Large marketplaces are centralized, which means that two-three separate parties - vendors, buyers, and, sometimes, suppliers - have to all use a single platform. On top of that, as an owner, you must manage all their interactions, making sure everything is transparent and in its place.

A transaction passing through several intermediaries must be utterly protected and secure, as well as all the personal and financial data stored on the platform. Blockchain has yet been the most successful solution at removing all the in-betweens and making things both fully transparent and firmly protected.

The technology allows deploying peer-to-peer networks, which means that the important data goes directly from part to party with no outside interventions and each party only sees what it should see without the ability to edit anything.

Thus, blockchain nodes help automate the process of passing, verifying, and recording deals and transactions made between the parties on the platform with no worries for data safety. The solution is quite revolutionary in that it doesn't allow to edit or delete or hack the data. This makes it a certain tech trend to watch out for, unless a new, even more revolutionary alternative appears.