The Future Of eCommerce

Retina Ready

Screen resolutions and displays will continually improve in quality.

We're sure that technology will eventually lead to us all using 3d screens with holograms and more but this is probably quite a few years away.

In the mean time the next big trend are retina screens - with Apple leading the way.

This survey from Instart Logic reveals that only 6% of online retailers are retina ready. You'll be glad to hear however that all ShopWired websites are retina ready.

This means uploading images that are at least twice as big as they will be displayed on a normal website page. So if an image container is 300 x 300, you should upload at least an image that is 600 x 600 to make sure it displays nice and crisp on a retina display.

Mobile Commerce

Probably the best understood of the future trends of ecommerce, mobile commerce will become increasingly important. By now, all websites should be optimised for use on a mobile, but the overall trend should definitely be towards webmasters having a responsive website.

ShopWired has made a commitment towards all of our websites being responsive by the start of 2015.

Personalisation

The future of ecommerce is definitely leading us towards more personalisation.

Personalisation doesn't just refer to your customers being able to personalise the products that they buy from you (with things like engravings). We're talking about you showing your customers suggested products based on their previous visits to your site, what they have bought before, what other customers have bought before, and more.

The ShopWired personalisation algorithm is currently in production and we'll be releasing more details about it soon.

Security

Google recently announced the bias it will show towards secure websites (those with forms that submit over an SSL connection) in search engine results.

Customers are also becoming more aware of the risks of submitting their data online, and rightly so.

At the moment the benefit of switching to a secure website will be negligible for most online retailers (we're talking about the ones where card information is submitted on the payment gateway's website) but it will become increasingly important in 2015.

We're currently investigating how we can offer SSL security on all of our customers websites without any additional hosting costs. We'll keep you all posted.