Top trends from E-commerce Expo in London
It’s been a busy week for our team at Multilogin, with our teams hitting the road to meet users at conferences from Traffic Summit in Istanbul to E-commerce Expo in London. We’ll hear more about Istanbul shortly, but first here’s our round-up of the key e-commerce trends for 2022 and beyond.
Multi-carrier fulfilment is booming
Even if you aren’t an e-commerce entrepreneur, you’ll probably have noticed the delays to shipping over the past two years. While the situation has stabilized somewhat since the pandemic, labor shortages, stretched shipping availability and low warehouse capacity means fulfilment can be difficult. 77% of sea ports, for example, are seeing abnormal turnaround times according to Bloomberg.
This means that multi-carrier fulfilment solutions are becoming more and more one of the salient e-commerce trends for online entrepreneurs of all sizes – not just the giants. These solutions mean your shipping can be managed via AI-driven engines to intelligently fulfil via multiple carriers and helping to offer customers multiple delivery options at the point of checkout.
As we’ve said before, fulfilment and delivery is an easily overlooked but crucial part of an e-commerce business’ success. Another stand-out statistic from the conference was that 40% of basket abandonment rates comes from delivery-related options, so it really is a game-changer for e-commerce businesses to be able to offer a whole range of times and pricing for a single inventory item, all without the hassle and cost of manual management.
Chinese influencer trends are spreading
We heard from multiple talks at E-commerce Expo about the rise of key opinion consumers. The terms originated with influencers on Chinese platforms like Wechat, Douyin/Tiktok, and refers largely to micro-influencers.
Unlike traditional influencers – referred to as key opinion leaders – key opinion consumers are micro-influencers with a very small following, perhaps as little as a few hundred. While the concept isn’t unknown in the west, it’s China’s smartphone-first culture that helped them to gain such a foothold in the market so early.
The selling point is the perception of authenticity: these are the consumers buying and using the product and sharing their findings with their followers. While they have a small footprint in terms of their influence, the engagement rate is often high, as we heard from many e-commerce brands. Generally speaking, the most common content they are producing is video-based. They may be live-streaming a product haul, doing pre-recorded shorts on some highlights from a product try-on, recording a traditional review, or a product may appear in some kind of vlog content. In all these ways, they are connecting on a seemingly personal level with the small community that they have built.
By and large, brands are not paying key opinion consumers, so it’s an organic strategy that requires cultivating your relationship with them, but pays off heavily with their engagement rates once you build them up. Imagine a pyramid with the smaller point devoted to your aspirational influencers (the key opinion leaders) whom you’re paying to overtly promote, and the wider half made up of many micro-influencing key opinion consumers.
This strategy is becoming more and more prominent outside the Chinese market, particularly , particularly with the rise of short-form video like TikTok and YouTube shorts. Brands are encouraging organic content in the form of reviews, sharing experiences and providing video responses (such as submitting creations for baking or looks for apparel stores). Livestreams are another growing e-commerce trend, with brands either providing products for reviews or inviting key opinion consumers onto their own streams to add relatability and authenticity.
Anti-fraud solutions are growing
We’re seeing an ever-more sophisticated range of supposed anti-fraud solutions hit the market. Much of it is great news for e-commerce entrepreneurs, helping to reduce fraudulent chargebacks, detecting bot attempts to perform activities like account takeover, and so on.
However, there is also a risk in there for merchants running multiple accounts. With solutions looking at crawlers, bots, potential ad fraud and the like, there is the risk that an otherwise positive e-commerce trend could also cause businesses with multiple storefronts to inadvertently fall afoul of their systems.
It only goes to emphasize the importance of having your accounts protected by the likes of Multilogin. With each storefront being run in a separate browser profile through Multilogin, each one appears in fact as coming from a separate, seemingly genuine and native device – helping to drastically reduce detectability and slash account bans. Betting against the probability of bans is one you can’t afford to lose, so find out more about Multilogin by clicking through to our pricing plans.
