The future of online selling

24/02/11

This is the third in a series of articles by Cate Trotter from Insider Trends. Cate is an expert in analysing consumer trends and regularly runs workshops in the Centre.

Here, Cate discusses the future of online selling and the ways in which you can make the most of these trends to grow your business.

Current online trends

With online retail sales predicted to grow from £30bn in 2012 to a huge £123bn in 2020, now’s a great time to set up or run an online store.

However, there are big changes ahead that e-tailers need to be aware of. As social media transforms the internet, it’s also transforming the way consumers buy online. Sites like Facebook and YouTube are raising the bar for engagement and interactivity on the web and smart businesses are enhancing their sites to keep up with the evolving expectations of customers.

For instance, proof of people’s love of online video can be found in the fact that YouTube is now the third most popular site on the internet, after Google and Facebook. Online stores such as Zappos.com are tapping into this trend. In 2010, it added 800 videos to its online shoe store. These demonstrated such a great return on investment that this year Zappos plans to add a further 50,000 videos.

French Connection has taken the art of selling via video one step further with the launch of Youtique, a YouTube channel that plays clickable videos. Customers watch for entertainment and education, clicking on the items they like to head straight to the product purchase page. By providing a source of enjoyment that makes clicking through very straightforward, French Connection maximises the chances of impulse buys.

Opportunities

The latest online retail innovations don’t have to be expensive. Many are free or within a smaller business’s budget. If you want to set up your own version of YouTique check out WireWax, which is currently offering customers free use of its clickable video software.

Similarly, it doesn’t require a huge amount of technical knowledge to bring your site up to the standard of big budget retailers. You can add review functionality to your website by cutting and pasting code for the Facebook Comment plugin, or enable your site to recommend pages to visitors using the Facebook Recommendation widget. Go to the Facebook Social plugins page to enter your requirements and let Facebook generate the code you need for free. It’s worth doing: when Argos added recommendation and review functionality to its website recently, it found that conversion rates went up 10%.

There are so many changes currently happening in online retail that this blog post barely scratches the surface. To find out more about the key trends affecting online selling and marketing, come along to Insider Trends’ Future of Online Selling and Marketing workshop on Monday 21 March 11.

Visit the Insider Trends website