Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the internet. In recent years it had the 2nd (2017) and 3rd (2018) largest e-commerce market shares, according to technology profiler BuiltWith. Some of the world’s biggest brands utilize the open-source CMS, Coca-Cola and Samsung among them.
For good reason. Magento provides retailers with online-shop software that is highly flexible, scalable and extendable. We often advise clients to go with Magento as it allows our developers to build a shop-system tailored to the clients’ needs.
Many expect Magento to become an even more powerful tool after the company was acquired by Adobe for 1.68 Bn. Dollar in May 2018. Since then Magento has released the long-anticipated 2.3 version of its product, introducing a set of intriguing new features.
To keep you updated on everything Magento, we’ll give you an overview of the hottest Magento trends in the following.
1) Mobile first with Progressive Web Applications (PWA)
The future of e-commerce is mobile. This is not breaking news, you probably know the stats. M-commerce (as it is called) made up about a third of U.S. retail ecommerce sales in 2017. That number is projected to go up to 54% in 2021, according to Statista.
Magento’s answer to this billion dollar redistribution of sales revenue is Progressive Web Applications Studio or PWA. The toolkit was released as part of 2.3.0 and helps retailers to build a user-friendly mobile shopping experience. Instead of creating an expensive native app, developers can use PWA to optimize a Magento online-shop in ways that exceed mere Responsive Design.
2) Personalization powered by Adobe A.I.
Again, nothing you haven’t heard of but it is worth repeating: Personalization is and will be one of the drivers of e- and m-commerce sales success. As millennial shoppers become more and more important for retailers, so do their shopping preferences. Millennials love personalization.
To stand out in the super competitive e- and m-commerce, online-shops have to provide customized shopping experiences. Magento offers plenty of options to achieve such, with tools that help you analyze and utilize user data. These tools are expected to become even more powerful thanks to artificial intelligence (A.I.)
Magento’s new parent company Adobe has developed the A.I.-technology Sensei that powers features on all Adobe products. Sensei will support Magento to create more personalized shopping experiences.
3) Automation and Chatbots
Adobe’s A.I. will not only help Magento-based businesses to understand their customers better. It will also revolutionize customer relation management.
While chatbots become more prevalent in e-commerce, they are still in the infant stages compared to what they will be capable of in 5 or 10 years. So far Magento does not support chatbots but there are plenty of Chatbot extensions you can plug into your Magento-shop.
The advantages of chatbots are obvious. They assist customers by answering questions, giving personalized recommendations and finding products. They can do this 24/7 and they get better at it over time.
4) Integration of sales channels
Platform integration is another megatrend in today’s technology industry that deeply affects e-commerce. Magento made platform integration a focus for 2019. Starting with Amazon, retailers will be able to fully integrate important sales channels into Magento.
This enables them to manage their Amazon catalogue via the shop system. Other channels like Google Shopping, Ebay or Facebook are planned to be integrated next.
5) (Live) video content is king
Product visualization is crucial in online retail. High-quality product images should be the bare minimum for every online-shop (although many don’t even clear that bar, as we all know. Hi Amazon.). The future of product visualization may well be in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
But in 2019 there’s a more readily accessible way to increase customers engagement and conversion in your Magento-shop: video marketing. For Alibaba’s Taobao app, as one example, live broadcasting has become a driver of e-sales.
Magento allows video content to be integrated into your webshop via Youtube API. Videos are a powerful tool to capture your customers’ attention. Most online and mobile shoppers don’t want to spend minutes reading product descriptions. They want to see and understand your product within seconds. Live video feeds are especially potent because they give customers a real human being to relate to.
The key to maximize Magento
These 5 Magento trends give you an idea what the soon future of e-commerce will hold for retailers. We at CodeControl are convinced that Magento will remain one of the leading providers for online-shop-systems. Therefore we constantly search and hire Magento developers to maximize the platform’s potential for our clients.