Key Ecommerce Trends for 2024 and Beyond

In the last two years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented evolution in digital commerce. The pandemic forced businesses to leap ahead years in terms of digital development in a matter of weeks, and we’ll look back on 2021 and 2022 as a major turning point for digital commerce, especially in B2B. Looking ahead to 2024, businesses need to tap into users’ willingness to go digital-first if they want to succeed. B2C, D2C and most importantly, B2B businesses must focus on sophisticated transactional business model acceleration, such as launching niche B2B marketplaces, in order to go beyond the standard, and beat the competition.

2024 is going to be all about composability and modularity – facilitating new complex and sophisticated digital commerce needs. Gartner describes how and why digital commerce must be composable and built on modular architecture if businesses want to create a future-proof architecture. This means having the agility to implement changes quickly, in a matter of hours, not months and years, to stay ahead of the curve. The flexibility of composable commerce facilitates the orchestration and integration of commerce ecosystems – all while connecting to 3rd party services and vendors. Solving the challenges of composable enterprises while leveraging its upsides by bringing app orchestration to the enterprise world will be a game changer.

In order to go beyond as a business and differentiate in the market, consider how commerce technology can be utilized to create business models beyond traditional retail. For instance, consider B2B companies such as those in the pharmaceutical/medtech industry. They’re utilizing commerce technology to create Unified Commerce-style experiences for their users where online experiences mirror those of in-person consultations. Consider too all the out of-the-box capabilities of commerce technology, beyond traditional online shops. For example, take multi-brand enterprises – they can utilize marketplace technology to bring together all their brands under one single roof to create a winning one-stop-shop in its vertical. By dreaming big, you can create sophisticated transactional business models that ensure your business succeeds well in 2024, and beyond.

Many of last year’s trends will remain exciting in the future, and one of the most important topics for me is optimizing coverage through B2B marketplaces. These offer companies great growth potential due to the fact that it is much easier to add new suppliers to a Marketplace platform than to carry out lengthy and complex product development or negotiate complex supply chains. In addition, this strategy is also suitable for increasing the agility of assortment development.

Newly emerging requirements and trends can be reacted to rapidly. New divisions and entire product categories can be integrated by thirdparty suppliers in the shortest possible time without having a greater impact on the company’s own value chain.

Coverage often increases automatically as customer attractiveness is improved, thanks to the wide range of products from a single source on the one hand and the reduced complexity of orders and deliveries on the other. In line with the theme of efficiency, PWAs also remain very popular and will continue to be so in the future. The particular advantage that these are optimized for both desktop and mobile devices thanks to their design allows companies to limit the focus of development to an app. At the same time, users do not have to take a roundabout route via an app store to download the app. More and more customers, also in B2B, expect a uniform customer experience across all platforms, and this is precisely where PWAs can be a good solution. Artificial intelligence also remains a hot topic, especially in combination with recommendation engines. Even though many still associates AI mainly with chatbots, the scope of application is much wider. Thanks to real-time data analysis, AI-supported recommendation engines can not only increase the average purchase value in online stores but also have a positive effect on the user experience through product recommendations and offers that are perfectly tailored to the customer.

A final trend for 2024 is of course the increasing sense of responsibility of companies with regard to sustainability. Such a development can also be clearly identified in the B2B sector. Many companies are aiming for a neutral CO2 balance in the medium term. Exciting tools and new software solutions are currently growing around this goal, enabling companies to make progress in this area. For example, by being able to track and evaluate all emissions, the company is able to make targeted savings or offsets.

Based on these trends, 2024 will also be an exciting year for the e-commerce world. It remains to be seen whether technologies that have so far only been used on a small scale, such as voice commerce or VR, will continue to establish themselves. Personally, I am following further development with the utmost interest.

We observed that especially in B2B digital transformation projects long focused on lowering the cost to serve or to enable careful testing of E-Commerce as a seperate channel. Covid has changed this and forced companies of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation. As a consequence, I am expecting a more holistic view on digital – initiatives will aim to build integral digital journeys. This means that every aspect of the route to market is subject to digitization. Digital tools will potentially facilitate every dimension of an organization’s operating model.

Feasibility to execute proof of concepts and time to market will be the two key differentiators. Going forward there will be no more one-fits-all-solutions. Those who master composability, will be able to put their eggs in all baskets, instead of just one.

Be bold. Most companies start too slow and lose valuable time and experience. In this context it is important not to try to digitize the offline business model. Instead, I recommend to consider new ways to deliver value to customers like our customer Wrist or 1.FC Köln did.

Depending on the maturity phase and type of company (B2B or B2C), we’re seeing different IT strategies heading into 2024: headless for best of breed strategy and more development freedom at the front-end, but also more companies, especially in wholesale, opting for integrated solutions such as NetSuite and DynamicWeb.

Then you’ve got user experience – B2C companies especially are focusing heavily on user experiences and customer journeys. B2B companies, however, still don’t realize that their users are “consumers” too, which is why it’s vital that B2B companies focus on the user experience as much as B2C companies do.

Speaking of users, we see them growing increasingly critical, especially when it comes to searching for and finding products. Too little attention is paid to the search bar and filters. Used effectively, the search bar can not only significantly increase conversions, but also provides a wealth of information, for example about missing products.

In 2024, own data will become increasingly important if cookies are blocked. For this, most companies are looking for a user-friendly CDP solution that can build 360-degree customer images, as well as AI predictions about visitors with similar behavior. Marketing campaigns can then be set up accordingly.

Last-mile logistics are becoming very important as more and more cities want to contain the increasing freight traffic. Electric transport bicycles and later drones will change the street scene more and more in the coming years.

Then you’ve got dynamic pricing, where we’re currently helping many of our customers. Parameters include (recurring) behavior, previous purchases, (logistical) availability, and competitive prices that are monitored in realtime.

Finally, for our customers, there must be a balance between costs and speed of delivery of functionalities or adjustments. Composability is certainly part of decisions but is seen as important especially by “mature” companies.

The bottom line: to go beyond as a business in order to meet these upcoming challenges, you need to be agile and flexible. Don’t get too hung up on ideas, but implement them, even if they often go wrong. Provide a “mistakes/learning budget”. Bring in small specialized advice clubs instead of large bulky ones. Create speed and fun. “Innovate or die!”