Top eCommerce Trends for 2024: Where Online Shopping Industry Stands
Great overview of the eCommerce landscape in 2024 (From: Qarea.com) eCommerce has always been a rapidly growing industry, but the past few years have changed the eCommerce landscape forever. Ever since its early days, eCommerce has always been among the fastest-growing industries. And since 2019, eCommerce has gone through its biggest transformation yet, but it’s far from being over. Here is what has happened in the world of eCommerce over the past couple of years and where it’s expected to go in 2024. The post-pandemic state of eCommerce While we are not yet at a point where the world can be declared post-pandemic, and the effects of COVID-19 are still noticeable, the eCommerce industry has changed dramatically over the last two years. These are the most notable trends in the eCommerce industry in the post-COVID era. eCommerce growth statistics show an inevitable slowdown After eCommerce sales skyrocketed in 2019-2021, the slowed-down growth was to be expected by 2024. Compared to 2021, when the eCommerce sales increased by 17.0%, 2024, with its 8.95% growth rate may not have looked as impressive. However, the slower growth can be explained by several factors, from the return of buyers to in-store shopping to the issues with the supply chain, which limited the sales possibilities for many eCommerce businesses. Online window shopping is an emerging trend Since the beginning of the pandemic, eCommerce has witnessed the emergence of a new trend: online window shopping. In order words, potential buyers are increasingly often filling their shopping carts and then abandoning them before checking out. This definitely started out as a pandemic trend, when the inability of the buyers to visit physical stores, paired with them being stuck at home during lockdown, forced them to look for substitutions to their usual shopping habits. At the beginning of the pandemic, eCommerce statistics indicated that up to 94.4% of shopping carts were abandoned. On average, up to 70% of carts are abandoned across all eCommerce markets with the highest abandonment rate belonging to mCommerce, where 85.65% of users fill their shopping carts and never return to them. This amounts to $18 billion in lost revenue every year.