It is expected that nearly 43.4% of all eCommerce sales globally will be via the mCommerce route in 2023. Over the past decade, mobile phones have transitioned from being just a device for communication into an essential commodity that has brought the whole world to our fingertips and empowered billions of users worldwide to experience the true power of digital transformation.
Mobile commerce, or mCommerce, has been perhaps the most significant outcome of this revolution wherein shoppers can pick from millions of choices available for their favorite products anywhere and anytime from their smartphones.
The meteoric rise of mCommerce is something businesses cannot afford to ignore while prioritizing their digital investments. On this note, let us examine the top 5 trends that retailers need to pay attention to for their mCommerce endeavors in 2023. We’ll also shed light on the role of headless commerce in realizing success with mCommerce.
1. The Rapid Adoption of New Themes and Trends
There is simply too much competition in the online retail space, and every major player is already in the market with their dedicated mCommerce options. Staying in the race would require a more strategic push toward incorporating the latest trends in selling.
For example, brands may have to leverage the power of social media to sell their inventory or rely on integrated physical-digital mechanisms to facilitate order fulfillment through stores and similar concepts. Such an approach requires changes mostly in the consumer-facing front of their digital channels. Back-end processes mostly remain the same.
2. Dynamic Scaling
From a performance standpoint, there shouldn’t be any lapses because it will greatly impact brand sentiments. While building your mCommerce strategy, it is crucial to have an eye out for architecture that is dynamically scalable without burning a hole in your pockets. It needs to cater to the needs of both front-end and back-end customization, which is possible when they both work independently.
3. Omnichannel Retail Experience
Customers would appreciate a consistent and stable experience across all channels they use to engage in retail transactions with a brand. Enterprises must ensure that their digital channels, like mobile apps, websites, or other smart device apps cater to the demand for consistency, performance, and security.
Switching between different channels shouldn’t be a problem and be devoid of any disruption. This is extremely important in the case of mCommerce because more shoppers are likely to rely on their smartphones to buy products from you.
4. Diverse Payment Options
A decade ago, customers only had the option of using either their cards or an outdated and slow net banking facility to initiate payments for online shopping. Fast forward to the present, and you are looking at nearly every major tech company having its own private payment system and platforms.
A smoother and safer payment experience matters a lot in elevating the overall mCommerce experience. For this, enterprises must be able to integrate all popular payment options in their checkout module seamlessly and without impacting other business workflows.
In other words, they must be able to securely exchange transactional data with a payment service to process it and then convey its status to the customer on their app or website as needed. For this to happen, the brand must be able to build an independent front-end system that will be supplied with a transactional status for each payment by a back-end system that works with multiple payment providers.
5. Continuous Marketing Innovation
Be it AR/VR experiences, or new promotional campaign content, your mobile apps or websites will always be buzzing with rich and interactive content. These may be initiated by the marketing or sales team to engage customers and convert more leads into deals. But these activities take place mostly in the front-end interfaces.
Your mCommerce strategy must be able to incorporate a design architecture that allows such front-end customizations and upgrades to be done immediately without disrupting any back-end services. Following a decoupled architecture for your commerce applications can help in achieving this goal faster without risks.
Enter Headless Commerce
As you can see from all the above trends, mCommerce works best when enterprises can build an expansive digital infrastructure but has a decoupled front-end and back-end. This allows them to experiment with new experiences on either side without risking total disruption. Such a win-win approach is something that only a headless-commerce architecture can support.
It allows online retailers to build their mCommerce channels with any desired technology on the front-end and back-end as per their convenience or affordability. The decoupled architecture provides an excellent cushion for innovations to be experimented with by different teams, like marketing on the front-end experience, without worrying about any subsequent risk to the back-end commerce engine.
Getting into the headless commerce journey is not easy, as it requires a lot of customizations and a wise selection of tools and platforms to support front-end and back-end infrastructure. This is where an experienced partner like Ignitiv can help bring a sizeable difference for a retailer in their mCommerce strategy. Get in touch with us to learn more about how adopting a headless commerce architecture can help build the most sustainable mCommerce journey for your business.
