Once upon a time, there was only one way to access services or buy the latest items and products – by heading to your nearest high street and visiting any of the number of brick-and-mortar stores available.
While this is still a key part of how people shop and procure goods, it is increasingly less relevant to many people’s daily lives. That is because of the internet, and specifically due to the online businesses that trade on it.
While certain items, from groceries to clothing, are still predominantly sought after in physical storefronts, more and more product categories and types of entertainment and services are being increasingly accessed through e-commerce platforms.
It’s not hard to see why this would be the case. Whereas your local high street or mall has a limited selection of items, online stores can feasibly have millions of products to select from. Online businesses also offer convenience in other key ways.
For example, whereas brick-and-mortar businesses must comply with local trading laws – and thus have set opening hours – online businesses have no such restriction. This means you can purchase something any time of day or night.
Online businesses also typically deliver their products to people. This saves time that a person would spend traveling to and from a physical business and enables them to schedule receiving items in a way that fits their daily routines.
Finally, with so much competition online – an estimated 12 million businesses are trading online today – prices are typically lower than what you would find in a brick-and-mortar business, further leading to the sector outcompeting non-digital offerings.
In recent years, the rise of e-commerce and online business has kicked into high gear, and the sector’s eagerness to embrace new technologies and modalities looks set to consolidate its lead.
But what is the latest from this burgeoning market? Let’s look at some key trends that ensure online business will remain the dominant means by which people make transactions and access services in the 2020s and beyond.
Collation and Comparisons
One of the greatest challenges facing online businesses is discoverability. After all, with so much choice online, one of the major points of focus for e-commerce brands is simply getting noticed.
Many approaches are employed by goods and service providers to this end, some of which are gaining ground as preferred methods today.
One of the best examples is the rise of online comparison platforms. These are sites dedicated to collating providers and products in a given category in one place. This has key advantages over merely using search engines. For example, CasinoReviews brings together a top list of the best online casinos available in regions worldwide.
To this, they also provide their users with competitive bonus offers and sign-up deals, making this a simple way to find one’s next gaming platform and one of the most cost-effective.
This is further borne out in other sectors, such as financial securities and insurance, where sites like Compare the Market have established themselves as the go-to resource for consumers.
New Delivery Tech
One of the greatest challenges facing large-scale online commercial operations like Amazon today is the logistics of delivering products to their customers. Recent years have already seen several key innovations in this area, from pick-up lockers to dedicated van courier services. Yet all of these pale before the potential latent in the arrival of delivery drones.
Such drones are undergoing final tests and are prospectively cleared for use in US states by the end of 2024. By being able to avoid traffic jams, and deliver products in a straight line warehouse to the front door, the productivity and efficiency gains they hold out is enormous.
While such moves are the province of major e-commerce players at present, it’s reasonable to assume that once this technology reaches maturity, postal services and courier networks will likely adopt them to remain relevant and competitive.
Drones may not be the only type of robot we’ll begin to see more of in the online business space; already wheeled delivery robots are undergoing trials in numerous cities worldwide, and the arrival of self-driving cars could pave the way for replacing conventional vehicles before long.
