It takes more than convenient payment options and an easy-to-use user interface for e-commerce businesses to thrive. Being adaptable to the latest technological trends is crucial for any e-commerce business
Business owners all over the world are constantly searching for how to grow their companies and how economic trends might affect their growth. For e-commerce, the determining factors are varying given the ever-changing nature of technology.
It takes more than convenient payment options and an easy-to-use user interface for e-commerce businesses to thrive. Being adaptable to the latest technological trends is crucial for any e-commerce business.
It’s also not just changes in technology trends, the COVID-19 pandemic forced dramatic changes in the e-commerce industry. Like Shopify put it in their ‘Future of Ecommerce’ report, 10 years of growth in the industry happened in just 90 days because of the pandemic.
With the pandemic, there is an even more need for e-commerce businesses to watch the trends and keep up with them.
For African e-commerce businesses owners, we have put together five important trends to know about in 2022.
1. Convenient experience for customers
Everyone is looking for and working towards ease. For customers, convenience is the optimal, especially since after the pandemic.
The easier you make a customer complete the buyer’s journey, the better for your business. In 2022, innovations around flexible and quick delivery, seamless checkout options, quick online return/refund are what is shaping the e-commerce business in Africa.
In Africa, logistics continue to be a problem and the more solutions an e-commerce business can offer, the better for them. Just recently, pan-African e-commerce platform, Jumia partnered with United Parcel Service (UPS) to expand its delivery services for businesses.
2. Personalise experience for customers
Personalisation is a huge concept in digital marketing and for e-commerce businesses, it has become one of the most important trends in 2022.
Many believe personalisation has to do with big tech stuff like artificial intelligence but it isn’t so. The smallest gestures can set your e-commerce websites apart.
A small gesture like a hand-written message on a receipt, a personal thank-you email, can help you increase conversion. Segmenting your customer base can help you send behavior-triggered messages. This could be based on location, past purchases or similar specific actions on your platform.
Personalisation isn’t for only your customers, for first-timers on your platform, creating a personalised onboarding journey to showcase a fast and positive first user experience could make a massive difference.
3. Dialogue with customers
Having a two-way conversation with customers is now a trend that fosters loyalty for your business. It’s a long term game and gives businesses the opportunities to build a community of brand ambassadors.
Sharing your passion with customers is one way to get them passionate about your brands. The focus here should be on what really matters to you as a business. Be transparent about your passion, mission and what you stand for. Hopefully, these things are worthy causes which will make people love your brand.
According to Small Business Trends, 71% of customers prefer buying from companies aligned with their values.
4. Optimise payment options
We wrote in detail earlier about the benefits of having an optimsed payment experience for e-commerce businesses.
Making payment easy for customers has great benefits for businesses. With mobile transactions dominating payments in Africa, it’s a no-brainer for businesses to power payment pages for mobile acceptance. A 2020 Instant payment annual statistics released by the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) revealed that 78% of total instant payments in Nigeria in 2020 were done on mobile devices.
Making payment as seamless as possible with easy-click payments is also a trend all e-commerce businesses in Africa should be on. Having information of returning customers stored on payment forms makes it easier for conversion.
Another way to make payments easier is to have local options available to customers.
5. Choosing the right partners
Running a business is hard and it’s no different for an e-commerce company in today’s fast-paced world. You can’t grow in isolation; you need strategic partners to scale your business.
And not just any partners, you need people to help grow your business. Take out time to review what a potential partner can add to your business. Do they care about you and your customers? Are your passion and vision aligned?
A partner like Fincra is like jet fuel to your growth engine. Partnering with Fincra for your payment solutions could help you increase conversion rate and scale your business.
Through Fincra’s reliable infrastructure, eCommerce businesses can scale globally with our easy to integrate API keys for payouts and collections, to enable them to perform transactions with ease and provide their customers with a better payment experience.
Fincra also provides white-label agency banking solutions to aid financial inclusivity and bring banking services to customers at the last mile. Through our infrastructure, financial institutions and businesses are able to provide banking solutions to their customers at their convenience.
You can also give our products a quick spin by signing up for a demo here: https://sandbox.fincra.com/auth/signup
