Its November 3rd and according to Amazon the
holiday shopping season is now three days old.
That’s right you haven’t even started looking for that perfect
Thanksgiving Day turkey recipe yet and your supposed to be shopping. We know it
gets earlier and earlier every year but it’s also getting a lot easier. Why?
Well mostly because of technological innovations, heck you can order online and
with voice activated devices these days but the bulk of these innovations are
centered on consumer’s mobile devices. It’s no mystery consumers are rapidly shifting
away from shopping on their desktop PC or mac and to their mobile device. It’s
convenient, user friendly and can be done on the go, in fact 70% of Amazon’s
customers worldwide shopped last holiday season using a mobile device.
Retailers are paying close attention to this change and are rolling out some
cool bells and whistles specifically for their mobile apps. So what new bells
can you expect to see on your mobile apps this holiday season?
Amazon’s AR – Amazon has a new feature of note the AR view
AR being short for augmented reality. So this feature just launched for
customers using iOS 11 and iPhone 6s or later enables you to basically place an
image of any item you are shopping for into your home environment before making
that purchase. Say you’re interested in a rug, vase or small piece of furniture
but you don’t know how it will look in the room well now you have the ability
to place the item within the environment and also rotate the item to get a
fuller 360 degree view of how it will look in your home.
eBay’s pic and tap searches- eBay had this in the pipeline
for a while and finally launched image search recognition technology. Take a
picture of an item and it searches eBay’s catalog of items looking for a match.
We tried it out with a few basic items and it seemed pretty accurate just don’t
expect it to know the difference between a Nine West and a Stuart Weitzman boot
just yet, so far it was only able to detect that it is a boot and its color.
eBay has also just added what they call a tap search to their mobile app. Easily
browse categories by tapping rather than typing a useful feature for those
simply browsing for some inspiration or not adept at the screen typing.
We are excited about these upcoming technologies as bulk of
our customers sell online and market places such as eBay and Amazon. As e-commerce business, you are going to
benefit from these innovations, which means more sales and more profit. Get ready for this record breaking Holiday
season and stock up on inventory today.