Online Store of the Future

The latest crisis has shown how important it is to be able to sell online. The threat of a "second wave" is driving shops into cyberspace.



It is not enough to make a website. It is necessary to bring people into it. The cost of attracting visitors to web stores is off the charts. It remains sadly to recall the days when the pioneers of the industry busily occupied their places on the new marketplace. Search engines were small and prices were green.



Meanwhile, new habits are already forming, and it is important to be in the right place before the competition. To do this, I propose to take a mental walk into the near future of the Internet in general and the online store in particular. And the direction will be set by trends.



We are all somehow accustomed to the fact that a serious Internet business is built on the computer Internet. Meanwhile ...

Moving away from competition

According to Digital 2020, more than half of the time (50.1%) we spend on the Internet is now on mobile phones.

Trend 1: mobile internet starts to dominate

Analysts at App Annie say mobile apps now account for 10 out of every 11 minutes of mobile use, and only 9% of our "mobile time" is spent browsing the web. We have to admit that mobile applications play the role of stores here. The rules of the game are completely different. And the competition is significantly lower.

Trend 2: Mobile apps play first fiddle in the mobile environment

Removing restrictions

Usually mobile stores operate with a small range of products / services. The limitation is directly related to the small screen of the smartphone.



We are used to using the classification menu to find a product. A price list of several thousand items, in a small window, turns into a nightmare with pictures (as without them). The large amount of data makes the classifier ineffective.







At the dawn of the Internet, there were site classifiers "yellow pages of the Internet". They are forgotten. Now, we consider it normal to write a request and find the answer in the top ten results of search engines.



It seems that we have become better at communicating with the computer. Monologue: " Look what I have ", changes to dialogue: " What do you want? " If you fantasize, then it is quite natural to tell the phone: "I want a cappuccino, "and get it somewhere nearby.

Trend 3: Among the large amount of data, search for queries close to natural communication dominates.

By replacing the classifier with requests, we get a few goodies.

• No need to puzzle over which is more important: the category Boots / Shoes or Men / Women.
• It is easy to use a complex product with characteristics. For shoes, this is the size and color, for cars, this is the car brand or body number.
• We encourage the user to formulate a desire. This helps the online seller to monitor the progress of the visit and help the buyer without asking unnecessary questions.

Emerging artificial intelligence is making the query language more natural and accurate. There are known successful cases with requests for photos or voice. Please note that the same Yandex Alice is most useful in the mobile sector. You can't take a photo or video from a computer as freely as from a phone.

A smartphone is the least convenient for on-screen communication, and most for voice, photo or video communication.

Roughly half of the 3.7 hours a day people spend with mobile phones in hand spend on social networking applications and instant messengers.

Trend 4: The most popular mobile apps are social networks and messengers.

It's time to take stock and notice that the Internet is shifting towards instant messengers on mobile devices. I was surprised! Communication support is the direct purpose of the phone. Can we say that this is what the center of gravity of the entire Internet is striving for?



Let's talk: the Internet is, first of all, a way of communication. A mobile phone is a means of communication that is always at hand. Communication with whom? Not only with a person, but also with a program. It's time to remember another trend:

Trend 5: chatbots are gaining popularity

More generally, I would formulate the general direction as follows:

The development of the Internet is moving towards the natural communication of a person

with a person or a machine through a mobile terminal.

I am far from radical thoughts that everything else will die out. I think that on the horizon of the next 5-10 years such a client-server architecture will prevail, where the main clients are mobile phones represented by their owners. Without pretending to be a pioneer, let's look through the prism of this formulation at online trading.



The online store of the future, in my opinion, should be a mobile application with natural communication capabilities. A live consultant or chat bot will become your interlocutor. A kind of advanced messenger.



Communication between a buyer and a consultant at a distance is very important against the backdrop of a pandemic. Such a store can become an outlet for offline stores under lockdown conditions.



Writing a mobile application is not cheap. And to endow him with the abilities of a serious chat and even more so. How to get to this clearing before others?

Reducing the cost

If we find an existing application, it will seriously reduce the cost of the project. Let's stretch the logic of the chatbot onto the face of existing instant messengers.



And you know, the choice is still not great ... Chatbots, one way or another, can be made in many messengers, but Telegram's capabilities are much wider. The most important difference for us is the ability to program buttons (Not everyone will like to remember and type commands manually). If you know analogs, please write in the comments.



In addition, the channels make Telegram a social network. And this is not a superfluous bun in the abilities of an online store.

Telegram with a chatbot is an inexpensive basis for your own online store.

It turns out that it is enough to program the internal logic of the chat bot, the multi-platform Telegram will take care of the rest.



I made an attempt to create such a chatbot. What I got after installing Telegrams can be viewed at https://t.me/repassBot .