The Top 3 E-commerce Trends In 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has sent the traditional brick and mortar retailers across the UK into a tailspin. More than 14,000 shops According to the Centre for Retail Research have closed so far in 2020. But with every downside, there is usually an upside. This upside is called online retail. In a September survey, one out of 10 shoppers said their shopping habits had changed permanently, and would never go back to what they were pre-pandemic. I think we can see this all around us, there has been a massive take up of online sales across all demographics of the population. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced retailers’ digital transformation plans forward. They may have already been in motion at many UK retailers, but now there is a rush to implement them. Long term plans have now become a short-term priority! Retail CIOs and CTOs are being asked to find the technologies and implement them to survive in a fast-moving retail landscape. This inspired us to take a look at the top 3 growing online retail trends this year. Having done all the research for this, we were amazed to find we had written articles about two of these trends this year, so let us dig in and see what these trends are! 

1. The Growth of Augmented Reality

First up, Augmented Reality! We did a blog on this back in July entitled 'Is Augmented Reality the future of the e-commerce race?' In this article, we concluded that answer was yes, it will be a big part of the future of e-commerce. We then ended up noting that the more people experiencing AR, the more they will want to use it in their shopping experiences.

Augmented Reality (AR) helps online shoppers visualise products, giving them a sense of realism to their experience. Historically one of the problems of shopping online is the ability to touch and feel a product. A flat picture can only say so much, of course, although you can't actually touch or feel the product, being able to manoeuvre a piece of furniture within your house before buying it, or to see what you look like wearing a piece of clothing makes for quite a compelling scenario. The likes of Burberry, Apple, Lululemon, GOAT, John Lewis and ASOS are among many online retailers that decided this technology is a great enabler for sales. It's only going to go one way, and that is more Augmented Reality within our life and on our phones.

2. The Growth of Voice Search 

At the beginning of this year (2020) we wrote a lengthy article entitled ’Is voice search within fashion e-commerce the future’. Very similar to the augmented reality article that we wrote it was again a resounding yes! Of course, this not only pertains to the fashion industry, it is all of the e-commerce industry as a whole that will be enhanced by this way of searching for products. Since that article, we have had even more evidence showing voice search is on the rise, here are a few predictive stats to show you where it is heading:  

• Quoracreative stats, States 50% of all searches across the internet will be voice-based by 2020.

• Gartner states 30% of all searches will be done using a device without a screen.

• OC&C Strategy Consultants state house penetration for smart speakers is predicted to rise to 55% by 2022.

Between the likes of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Samsung’s Bixby we have a myriad of ways on how we can gain information by using our voice. As well as these devices being an amazing curator and distributor of information, it is also starting to become a powerful tool to be used in an online retail search. Making sure your website is optimised for voice search is now a large consideration for most online retailers. Again, we wrote another article this year entitled ‘8 Strategies On How To Optimise Your Website for Voice Search And Why To Do It’. - Okay, yes, we are always writing articles! We sort of can't help ourselves as we live in interesting times, what can we say! Anyway, back to the article, we could see how voice search was gaining momentum within the industry so we wrote a well-received blog outlining some of the strategies that can help companies improve their SEO for voice search. 

We have seen voice search certainly grow in popularity this year and a lot of e-commerce companies seem to be factoring this into their SEO solutions and strategies. In an article by lead Web Praxis Media https://leadwebpraxis.com/voice-search-and-its-sustainability-in-the-digital-world/, they mentioned that ComScore estimates that more than 50% of searches done by users in 2020 will be voice searches. They concluded by saying ‘voice search is just warming up and by 2025, it will be part of our daily lives. It is a viable disruption to the traditional system of assistance and it is sustainable in the digital world’, and we would have to agree! 

3. Growth in AI

We have saved this one to last as it is probably one of the most important technologies to hit online retail, also the two above trends have an element of this technology within them already. In fact, AI is one of the biggest growing industries as it can enhance most electronic experiences and market sectors. From medical software to predictive stocks and shares analysis, it is slowly making its way into all business sectors. So let's have a look at the online retail story for this technology!   

When you visit a traditional shop one of the upsides is that you can talk to a shop assistant. A good assistant can guide you through your purchase selection, imparting knowledge and recommendations that are tailored to you. AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning have the potential to bridge this gap in the online world. This is another critical piece to the jigsaw to make online shopping seamless and engaging, providing a positive experience and good customer service. Before the pandemic, 40% of UK retail CIOs and CTOs said they thought their companies should be investing in AI. According to a study by Deloitte UK, 72% of British businesses in 2019 had already achieved a positive return on their AI investment, an indication of the positive effect that it is already having within the industry. 

Using AI can help online retailers learn about their customers and their habits, giving them a more personalised experience and helping them with shopping solutions. There are many ways you can implement AI solutions, but, it all comes down to the collection of data with real-time insights and various algorithms built around this data. Put this together with automation like 24/7 customer support via chatbots, and you can go a long way to optimising the customers’ buying experience.  

Successful e-commerce companies are using personalisation technology to give consumers their very own experience. Personalisation for customers on e-commerce websites is achieved by dynamically showing content, recommendations and products that are all tailored by the information gathered on the person. This can be a person's growing online history, social media habits and how they interact with the website. Then liberally sprinkle with predictive AI data using purchase history, customer demographics and personas, and you have a solid bespoke experience for each customer. 

Amazon uses a lot of AI, a staggering 35% of their sales come from their recommendation engine. They make a unique homepage for every single customer that provides personalised recommendations using item-based collaborative filtering. North Face adopted IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology to help predict what jacket would be best for their customers, based on variables like location and gender preferences. According to a survey conducted by Econsultancy, about 74% of marketers have stated that targeted personalisation increases their overall customer engagement rates. So there is a drive from both software solutions companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM, and online retailers using these solutions like Amazon, ASOS and IKEA to use AI to enrich the customer experience.

The ability to ape the traditional shopping experience through a personalised customer journey will be the key to winning in the online e-commerce market. Juha Valvanne, Founder of Nosto, a tech platform that delivers personalised e-commerce experiences said: “Personalisation is the missing ingredient to a successful online shopping experience and will be key to 2020 and the future of e-commerce.” And we can see things like this working, with the likes Natori using artificial intelligence to help with their digital ad spending resulting in a 76% increase in their social media revenue. There are lots of tools being developed around AI and it will increase over the next few years. Google’s  £400m purchase of start-up DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company that specialises in algorithms and machine learning for positive impact, is a big nod towards this. Of course, with all of this comes the grey lines of how much data should companies hold about you to help you to shop. Another question for another day I feel! But to finish up I like this quote by Masayoshi Son -

“I believe that artificial intelligence is going to be our partner. If we misuse it, it will be at risk, if we use it right it can be our partner.”

In conclusion 

In researching for this document it is obvious that online retail and e-commerce is in a cycle of massive growth, pushed on by the pandemic that we've all experienced. There were lots of trends to come out of this article, but these seemed to be the top three driven by technology. There are other trends outside of the technology realm like influencer marketing, but the technology trends seem to be the most popular at the moment. 

It is definitely all about clever digital marketing together with the integration of AI, AR and voice search. In fact, to round this up I wrote a personal blog a while ago about my fantasy shopping experience, using a mixture of voice search, AI and AR! It’s available here when I wrote this I did not realise that these topics would be so currently hot! Privacy issues aside, I can't wait for my fantasy shopping blog to turn to reality, I will sit back with a smile on my face and think, no more walking around stores for me! 

Are Backlinks Still Important in 2020? - 11 Strategies To Use!

This is the second article in a series of articles on how to improve your SEO. Our last article 'The Foundation Steps Of How To Improve Your SEO' gave you a solid basis to move from. This article looks at another foundation step that you will encounter in SEO, 'backlink building'. So is backlink building important in 2020? Well, the short answer is yes! Google is always updating its algorithms and it amasses an amazing amount of data points to decide on what content rises to the top. In the old days, people stuffed their websites with keywords, added a few backlinks and it was an SEO hit. But times have moved on, and although Google does not lean on the backlinks like they once did, they are still a very important side of improving your SEO.  

Today it is more important to build high-quality links rather than go for masses of low-grade spammy options. Google is a lot smarter than it used to be in this area. Old techniques that previously worked, like submitting your website to web directories and getting a link in return are not the way forward anymore! They were starting to be abused, so Google stopped giving this style of link as much value. Recently, Google has actively penalised the rankings of websites who attempt the overuse of spammy techniques in link building, often referred to as 'over-optimisation'. We don't currently fully know how much link building is part of the search algorithm, but the general consensus among SEO practitioners is that it is still one of the biggest constituent parts, and remains within the top three of ranking factors of the algorithm. 

So What Are Back Links? 

Backlinks are a link created when one website links to another, usually to a piece of related content or something the other website wants to highlight. Link building is the process of gaining these hyperlinks (let's just call them links for now) This is a way for website users to navigate between pages on the internet. Backlinks are also called 'inbound links' or 'incoming links'. They are important for SEO as they represent a 'vote of confidence'. They are a signal to search engines that others hold your content in high regard. If many websites link to your website, webpage or blog content, then search engines can deduce that your content is worth highlighting. This then helps it gain a higher placement within the 'Search Engine Results Page'. So we can now build a picture of why backlinks are so important as they have a positive effect on your website's ranking position.

Building backlinks

Building backlinks will be part of your 'Off-Site SEO Strategy' which we will go more into detail in later posts. The process of gaining these links is known as link building or earning. Now, not all backlinks are cut from the same cloth! Some backlinks are a lot more valuable than others. Backlinks from in-demand, trustworthy, high-authority websites carry much more weight than backlinks from low-authority, potentially spammy websites.

If people follow links to your website and stay around for a bit, this is an indication to Google your content is valid. But even just being mentioned by a high-quality website without people following the link can give your website a major boost. That can be the difference between a high-quality link to a low one.

Understanding A Link

Search engines use links in two different ways, one to discover new webpages and the second is to help them with how well the page should rank. When they are deciding on ranking, search engines will not only look at the content of the page; they will also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites. So, you will be ranked on the quality of those external websites, the number of links and the quality of the content.

How do we start

Backlinks can be a time-consuming pursuit and they are often regarded as one of the harder jobs of creating good SEO. If you are new to these strategies or have known about it but just have not got around to implementing them, they can be difficult to know where to start. But mastering your backlink strategies can put you apart from your competitors. Do not fear we are here to help with some backlink strategies and tips! 

First Things First, The Rules of Engagement - Play Nicely! 

When building backlinks do not take shortcuts or eventually you may be found out and your ranking could plummet. Your backlinks should be well editorially earned, be from relevant high ranking websites and not be paid for in any way. This is a good rule of thumb. 

Secondly - Do Some Competitor Backlink Research

Let's start with the one that can get you underway quickly and give you an insight into where you should be focusing your time. Let's start an investigation into a high ranking competitor that uses the target keywords that you use. Looking at their backlinks will give you a big insight on what to do and the type of backlinks you may want to start targeting. There are many tools out there to help with this, but two such are SEMrush Backlink Analytics Tool, and backlink tool like Link Explorer. These services can help you see the important links that a competitor already has, then you can start targeting those types of links and website in your own link building strategies. You are learning by what has been successful for companies in the past, rather than guessing at what you think maybe a good strategy for you. 

Okay Now On to The Link Building Strategies

1 - Passive Resource Link Building

Now you are armed with some intel from your competitors you can start writing content that may attract these type of websites to link to you as you now know what they like to look for. This is a great way to shape your content writing for your website. Create resource pages and blogs that will earn quality backlinks from relevant website authorities. This is a slow process but after a while, it will work, then you can go out to other websites and highlight the content you are producing.  

2 - Guest Content & Blog Writing.

An oldy but goody, you now have a list of websites you would like to be on, and you know what kind of websites that like your type of content. So reach out to them and ask if you can create a guest blog post or article on a topical subject that they are covering. Supply them with great content and a link to your website and you are off at the races. If you have actioned the above point and already have built great content for your website, you can give them a link to show them the quality of your work. They may even link to some of your content in the future as they now know about you! 

3 - Link Gap Analysis

Now you have all your data from your 'Competitors Backlink Research' so find websites that link to your competitors but do not link to you. If a website has linked to many of your competitors, there is a real good chance that they will link to yours too. Reach out to them and see if you can strike up a relationship and get a link. Study why they are linking to your competitors and then put together a justification case for linking to you too, it may just work! 

4 - Business Association Links

Are you a member of any type of business association? Chamber of Commerce? Or any industry bodies and special organisations? This could be a nice opportunity to earn your site some easy links!

5 - Collaboration and Suppliers links

If you collaborate with or sell other people's services or products, you should be reaching out to them and asking if you can go on their supplier, stockists or collaboration page. If they don't have one ask if you can write some content on a subject that relates to them that they would like to link to. 

6 - Digital PR & Journalisum

PR can be one of the strongest ways to build lots of quality links. Journalists and bloggers often rely on PR contacts to feed them with stories, there is a vast appetite to create constant new stories. If you can create a great story about your brand and get it out on mass to journalists and bloggers you could earn yourself hundreds of quality links. Regularly creating these story and events can also lead you to be seen as an industry expert. There are plenty of good books out there on how to build great PR, grab one and make yourself a Chief PR Officer! 

7 - HARO & Journalistic Quotes

Slightly related to the last point HARO is an aggregator where you can give quotes to journalists who are looking for help when writing their stories. There stands a good chance that they will link out to your website and give you credit for your quote. Many journalists are hungry for a quote to go in their article. Once signing up to HARO you will be sent opportunities to respond with quotes, choose wisely and you may build some great links. 

8 - Link Building With Listicle 

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is a short-form of writing that uses a list as its thematic structure but has sufficient copy to be published as an article. You often see them with titles like '10 Best Restaurants in London". You can use Google search operators to look at listicles in your industry that mention your competitors. Then look to see if you are included. To get added to some listicles, you need to reach out to a blogger and tell them why you may be better suited to being in their list. See if you can add value in any way for them and you may just get in!

9 - The Broken Link Building Solutions

Analyse any broken external links that point to 404 pages off websites that you would like a link from. Then see if you have any relevant content that this could link to, or build your own content around the links description and page content. Then reach out to the webmaster of the website and suggest your alternative replacement link to your content. You are helping them reduce their 404 breaks, and also the time they would need to source the new information if they did this themselves! It's a win-win for everyone!  

10 - Ask for links from Brand Name Mentions 

Go to something like the SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool and have a look if your company has been mentioned but there is no link to your website. Then you can reach out to the webmasters or bloggers who mentioned your brand and ask them nicely if they would add a link for you. Talk about how a link may help their readers with context. 

11 - Testimonials

You have probably asked for testimonials from your customers and clients in the past, but you can also build backlinks by writing them. If you write a testimonial or case study for a business that you deal with they will usually publish it on their website. You can ask that they link to your website from the testimonial as this will show the testimonial authenticity. 

Conclusion 

I have covered some tactics here and there are even more to discover. If you want a strategy that is right for you then this can depend on the time you have and the industry you are in. At the start give them all a go, see what is the most productive for you, and which gives you a good return on your time! One thing is for sure, putting a solid backlink strategy in place will reward your website with great SEO in the long term. It takes time to build, but it is a core foundation step that will see your website go from strength to strength.

The Foundation Steps Of How To Improve Your SEO

A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog that was well-received entitled '8 Strategies On How To Optimise Your Website for Voice Search And Why To Do It?' In this article, we went over how you could optimise your website for voice search as a future-proofing exercise. It then dawned on us; we may have put the cart before the horse! We were presuming people had already invested time in looking at their SEO, analysing it and implementing the basic concepts. Of course, this all takes time, and you may not have got around to doing this in all the hustle and bustle of running your business. On this note, we thought we would put this guide together for you that would complement our previous blog and start you out on some healthy primary Ninja habits. We have only covered three foundation steps here, but we will cover more advanced stages in an ongoing series of blogs on this subject. (Please subscribe at the end of this blog for future articles) Our advice is to make sure the foundation steps are solid first. Then you will not waste time further up the road on advanced strategies that are not working because of shaky foundational steps. So let's start from the beginning.

Starting from the very beginning

First things first, when we start on the SEO improvement path of enlightenment, we look at all the amazing advice, and there is a temptation to go all Bruce Lee on it. You know, a thousand press-ups on your knuckles, lighting matches in mid-air with your nunchucks, that sort of thing. We get it, the secret science of SEO is exciting, and the temptation is to go straight to the more complicated stuff! But why try the 1000 press-ups when you have a bad back and a dodgy shoulder!? Lets pause and see our physio first, you know, get all our joints and back aligned. Then work our way up to the starring role of 'Enter the Dragon'! What is a press-up without the core foundation being strong before you start? So what is the first foundation step?

1: Build Your Customer Personas

So what is the customer or buyer Persona? And why should we start the road to SEO with them? Buyer Personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. You base this fictional customer on real data and research that you already have from your existing customers and your competitor analysis. Buyer Personas help you understand your existing and prospective customer habits much better. There is never just one Persona; there may end up being many that help you to understand how to drive the direction of your SEO. This then makes it much easier to tailor your SEO, keywords, content, product development and services to meet the buying behaviours of existing and potential customers. Personas are often used in content marketing. If you are writing content for the wrong type of person, then you are wasting precious marketing resources. So we usually start the whole marketing process off by really understanding our customers, delving into their attention and buying triggers by using Personas.

Although Personas used to be the preserve of inbound marketing and content creation, we feel you should always start your SEO process off with a persona building prosses too! Your building blocks of SEO must be directed in the right way from the very beginning. Doing this as a first step, it also gives you an amazing resource of information for when you do start your content marketing, which is also one of the many pillars of good SEO that we will go into in later articles!

OK, we hear you say, but I still do not get what they are, and how to create them? Well, we have you covered. One of the best marketing platforms out there is Hubspot, and it has a great article on what Personas are and how to create and use them. Have a look at the article on Hubspot here. But just as a little heads up here is a preview of a Persona template from the Hubspot resources pack you get with the article.

Now we have you safely turned on to Personas, let's get to foundation part two....

2: Audit Your Website

Yes, let's see what we are starting with, let's dig in deep under the hud of your website and make sure we fix some of the basics before we move on. For this, there are many tools out there. First up is Neil Patel's website, he has a gold mine of information on marketing and SEO, and amazing mini-courses too. His SEO checker is here, it is a great place to start and will spot the potential fundamental problems you need to fix. Also, head over to Woorank and see just what's going on with your website's performance. There are lots of services out there, just google 'SEO Website Checkers'. I like these two for a good overview of what is happening in terms of website performance and SEO fixes. They will give you a website score and highlight potential problems for improvement, these could be things like:

• Title Tags

• Meta Description

• Header Tags (H1 H2 etc.)

• Content

• URL issues

• Sitemaps Validity

• Broken Links

• Slow webpage loading

• Mobile-friendliness

• Security

• Backlink score

• Trafic ranking, and much more....

3: Analyse Your Website Data

OK, now we have a list of potential website problems that we can fix, the last piece in the foundational jigsaw is linking your google service like Google Analytics, and Search Console to your website. Have you got the tracking code on your website already? If not install it now, you will need it to analyse what is going on with your website traffic and the behaviour of your potential customers when they arrive on your website.

Looking at how people behave once they land on your site is worth its weight in gold. Google Search Console tracks data and key metrics, like the number of sessions you have and bounce rates, to name a few. You can see who your referral sources are and how people move around your website. Getting to know all this data will make you better at finding any potential problems on your website. Google Analytics is user-oriented, giving you data on who is visiting and interacting with your website. Google Search Console, is a search-engine focused analytic tool, unlike Google Analytics, which gives you customisable data in an easily-managed format. Google Search Console offers more suggestions, highlighting problem areas for improvement. If you want to crack down on SEO development, this can be a great tool to harness.

The Conclusion

There endeth your three foundational steps. The yellow belt is firmly around your waist. You have all the information you need to implement all the trick flicks and Kung Fu kicks you need to start to become the JuJu Chan or Bruce Lee of SEO. Why? Because you now know who your target audience is and how to engage with them. You are on the road to fixing simple issues on your website that can harm your search engine rankings. And finally, you can now see patterns of what people do when they are on your website. You can improve their experience and increase customer conversions. You now have the structure and customer intelligence, and these are foundational steps to build on, this is real ninja stuff!! As Bruce would say, 'Be Water My Friend!'

Do you do all this already? Would you like more articles on SEO in the future? Let us know, or subscribe to our regular blog articles HERE.

Is Augmented Reality the future of the e-commerce race?

Augmented Reality has gained popularity over the last few years due to the advancements in mobile technology. There are a lot of big companies betting their future on the technologies behind it. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google are all in the game and are pushing to be the leaders in this race. But what is the future health of this technology and should the e-commerce companies chase the super sprinter to the finishing line?

The technology behind this is making great strides with the fierce competitiveness in the market place between Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore software. We can plainly see if there is so much at stake for these companies they are going to work hard to create a market for these services. Great games and one-off demonstrations of what it can do are nice, but not enough! They know this technology needs to be used by us in a frictionless manner on a day to day basis. To do this they need to find business applications for it to become part of the fabric of our everyday life. 

The Growth of AR 

In 2019 Augmented Reality saw a record growth and AR-enabled mobile devices reached the 1.5 billion mark. It was predicted that this year (2020) would be the year that would see a marked uptake in AR growth! 

A Gartner report predicted that over 100 million users would be using some sort of Augmented Reality technology by 2020. A BRP report (Boston Retail Partners part of the Windstream Holdings) stated back in 2018 that 32% of retailers expect to add virtual and augmented reality in their shopping experience over the next three years. As of the end of 2019, this figure was at around 15%. Compare this to a report that stated 48% of customers said they would be more likely to buy from a retailer that provided Augmented Reality and all of a sudden you can see the opportunities. We can see by these figures, retailers that are early to the party and implement it well could have a real advantage. Their customers will have a more immersive experience to interact with. So the slow jog to AR really may end up in a sprint if the customers have anything to do with it. 

What Brands are Currently Pioneering Augmented Reality? 

Bringing brands and products to life is one of the known virtues of Augmented Reality. Allowing shoppers to visualise products more engagingly, together with creative ways of placing objects into real locations is the real currency of AR. The DMA’s chief executive Tim Bond said: “Mixed reality technologies, like AR and VR, hold huge potential for organisations to offer customers new ways to bring their brand to life, whether that is by transporting them to another reality or enhancing the one they’re in.” He went on to say “However, it is also important for marketers to always put the customer at the heart of these experiences and offer them something they will value. Brands must also consider how they can maintain consistency across the digital and physical worlds they now inhabit.”

This year Charged Retail quoted that nearly 40% of consumers in the UK say they have used AR or VR to test or view a product they’re considering purchasing. We can see things are speeding up since the 2018 predictions with a good adoption of these technologies from consumers. Obviously, as stated by Tim Bond, these experiences have to be of value. But if they are, it looks like consumers are drawn toward the AR experience like Usain Bolt to the finishing line. Let’s have a look at a few of the retailers who have decided to get into the wonderful world of AR! 

Retailers Embracing AR

Ikea: 

Originally launched in 2017 the Ikea Place app, it allows users to superimpose 3D digital model renderings of its products onto your smartphone, letting you see how their furniture would fit in your home.

Asos

Developed in partnership with AR firm HoloMe, Asos launched its “Virtual Catwalk” in June 2019. The concept is for users to point their smartphone camera at any flat surface allowing them to see a virtual model exhibiting the clothes on a catwalk. They have also launched an augmented reality app that allows you to see what items look like in different sizes, on different body types.

Apple

Apple’s Quick Look launched in 2018, it allows retailers to upload 3D renders of their products so users via Apple's website can superimpose virtual products into their homes using iPads and iPhones. As you can imagine implemented, coming from Apple it is a slick experience. 

Burberry

Burberry released it’s augmented reality feature this year enabling customers to view 3D renders of its products via Google Search, we will talk about Google search later as it is fully in the race! 

There are many more companies that are releasing their versions of augmented reality within the marketplace this year. We have only covered a handful here but will be looking at more companies that are releasing AR in a future blog, so keep a lookout for that! Meanwhile, let's take a look at whether e-commerce companies should be considering AR for their next website upgrade!  

Should E-commerce Companies Enter Into The AR Race?

Well, I think from the research we have to say the answer is yes! I’m sure many people from e-commerce companies reading this are well down the road of implementation. But there are bound to be those on the wall too, not too sure whether to dust their running shoes down and get in the race. 

The more people that experience AR, the more they will want to use it. So far the majority of e-commerce retailers have not yet implemented their solutions. But, with Google announcing at its 2019 developers conference that it was introducing AR functionality into its search results, that really does turn up the pace of the sprint! 

Great SEO is also a pre-requisite for e-commerce companies. By Google announcing AR functionality into its search results they will be considering this. When they dish out your search results this could start becoming an important issue. Their algorithms are always evolving and they do tend to favour websites engaging with future technologies and best website practices (Remember the move to prefer mobile-friendly websites!?). Add to that the visually pleasing, slick experience that will be engaging for customers and it looks like AR has left the blocks! It may be only at the 20 meters mark of the 100-meter race, but with the major technology players trying to be as swift as Usain Bolt, Carl Lewis and Linford Christie, you know you’re in for a good race!

A Fantasy Vision of Voice Search in Fashion Retail

I think of myself as a bit of a Futurist, I love dreaming of ideas that would make my life great with technology! So, here is my take on what I feel the future of Voice Search combined with AI and AR could hold for the online fashion industry! Let me give you my vision.

I walk into my house and ask VA (my voice assistant) to put the lights on and brew me a coffee,       

VA replies "I will let you know when the coffee is ready".

I sit on my couch and decide it is time for a new Jacket. “VA, I'm in the mood for a new Jacket, show me some jackets from my casual profile”. I have 3 profiles that I have built into my clothes and body profiler app, Business, Occasion and Casual. These profiles have stored all my clothes preferences into categories from data I have added, and it learns from the clothes I purchase and websites like Pinterest. Over the years this has built up the perfect profile of the style of clothing I love. Within this app is also my body composition, you can visually scan your body with the camera in your phone or enter in your body details, size weight and height so it builds the perfect 3D body model of yourself. Of course, this is connected to your WIFI scale so the app can inform you politely that your stats may need refining. Once you have a good profile, search engines and retailers can call up the profile for information to help with the search.

The first search turns up items on my video wall, (surely, we will all have these by 2025!) with a polite voice that says, "here is your search, can you see anything you like?"

I say, “no, not really, I quite like A3, but I want more flare, look at my fresh and funky board”. Like categories, my boards are like mood boards that depict different styles and feel that I like. It just so happens if I want some kicking flares, abstract materials or wide collars, you know, something a bit different, it's all in my 'Fresh and Funky' mood board.

Straight away VA comes back and says "OK, I know exactly what you are looking for!" Fifteen Jackets appear on the wall that I mostly like. I say, “let's have a look at B2, the funky looking fitted jacket with the modern tweed and frayed patches”.

All of a sudden, a life-size 3d model of me appears on the wall in the Jacket. “Ok, I really like that VA, but I would like to see myself walking down the road on a sunny day from all angles”.

"No problems!" My trusty voice assistant says!

I appear walking in sunlight, I can see how the jacket moves, the fit and how the light affects it as the camera pans around me. Looks good I think, definitely suits my body type!

Of course, all this is achieved by garment modelling and profiling software. This is then paired with your profile app to match it to your body type. “I love this, but I'm not so keen on the brown, do they do it in a different colour?”

"Yes" says VA, "they have it in grey or mustard."

“Fit me in grey and put me in a restaurant in low light”.

"OK," says VA. And there I am sitting at a restaurant table in my new jacket. “I really like that, order it for me now”.

"OK, this will be with you by this Thursday, but before I order there is a shirt that matches this really well, would you like to look at it?"

“Go on then”. And just like that, I now appear in the most wonderful shirt with the Jacket! I think to myself this profiling business is going to cost me a fortune!

“Yes VA, please add that too.”

"Shall I now go ahead and order?"

” Yes”, I say.

"It will all be with you on Thursday before 1 pm. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

“No, have a good night VA”. With a coffee in my hand and a smile on my face, I sit back and look forward to Thursday. Just in time for the weekend! I think to myself wow; this is so much easier than back in 2020!

Well, that is my fantasy and perfect storm, it tackles a lot of the problems that I have highlighted in our article ‘Is Voice Search Within Fashion E-commerce the Future?’

I have no doubt that the Voice revolution that has just started will gain momentum and I look forward to the day I can sit on the sofa and order a new jacket with ease, without having to lift a finger!

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Thanks for reading

Ed Ball

Creative Director

Prestige Recruitment Group