EY Tech Trends Chapter IX: Top retail technology trends to watch … – Ernst & Young

Video commerce and ad monetization 

Retailers are fast adopting livestreaming, video commerce and assisted selling as means of improving conversion online. While the initial journey with e-commerce has been about substituting human experience along with digital plus always on commerce, now increasingly it is moving towards providing human led experience to drive to business. As per eMarketer research report, social will outpace total e-commerce in 2023, growing 13. 2% year-over-year (YoY) in China which is currently the leading country in video commerce. Also, livestreaming via social media will grow fastest of all, by 23%. Notably, virtual influencers have grown by 285% in market scale over the last three years within China. Furthermore, sales conversion via interpersonal influencers is witnessing two-to-three-fold growth compared to brand communication. Major brands including beauty and luxury brands are successfully livestreaming their major fashion events on their e-commerce sites. The key premise here is to reduce the gap between consumer demand generated through content with the actual act of transformation.  

Knowing that retailers have their own customers coming back for more content and assortment, also opens the opportunity for merchants to build additional revenue stream simply by providing additional services in order to brands, such as ad targeting capability plus consumer insights. In store world, where there is a constant pressure to be competitive in terms of pricing while providing leading experience, ad monetization opens a much-needed additional income stream. A multinational web commerce giant offers reported nearly 7% to 8% of their revenue because ad revenue and currently is the particular third largest ad network in the US. Another Chinese ecommerce leader provides the biggest ad system and reported 34. 3% of the total net digital advertisement revenue in China a few years back.  

However , building such ad network and competing requires specialized capabilities around – technology , managing consumer consent, customer data plus AI/ML led segment creation.