Four eCommerce Strategies for Success in 2025
Whatever you sell, the lure of digital markets has become irresistible. With an estimated global value of $4.1 trillion and forecast to account for 38.6% of retail revenues in the UK this year, eCommerce is no longer just the concern of giant global brands and tech-savvy digital upstarts. With few exceptions, every retail business is an eCommerce business these days. Few can compete without being online.
But the digital retail gold rush has created its own challenges, too. Online markets are so crowded it can feel choking. With literally a world of choice at consumers’ fingertips, getting eyes on your brand and holding attention can feel nigh on impossible for smaller businesses. From SEO to social media, the race for clicks and shares, five-star ratings and sales is relentless.
Here’s where the expertise of an eCommerce agency can be invaluable. From building high-performance web stores to retail-focused digital strategy, Key Element has a wealth of experience helping retailers make a success of their online operations.
James our eCommerce expert has shared what he thinks will be the key to getting online sales soaring in 2025.
1. Embrace Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce)
Mobile phones now account for 57% of all online sales in the UK, making them the number one channel for eCommerce. But despite that, a lot of online vendors are behind the curve in terms of optimising their sites for mobile. Despite the fact that responsive design automatically adjusts how web pages load and appear for different screens, and that eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce make testing how a page works on mobile easy, a lot of web stores still experience performance issues on mobile.
Slow, glitchy loading, awkward navigation and content that doesn’t fit on the screen detract from the mobile shopping experience. Most consumers will simply head to another site rather than put up with it. With m-commerce forecast to generate £100bn in sales in the UK this year, losing mobile custom is not something any business can afford.
The solution lies in adopting a mobile-first design approach for your web store. While you’ll still make sales on desktop, usage figures suggest most of your digital customers are using smartphones. The mobile-first design includes adopting swipe-friendly navigation, simplifying layouts, integrating mobile wallet payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay for one-touch checkout, and using techniques like ‘lazy loading’ (content only appearing when it is needed) to speed up load times.
If your online store hasn’t had a mobile-first refresh, we’d strongly recommend speaking to our eCommerce web designers as a priority this year.
2. Deliver a Seamless Digital Experience
While m-commerce is increasingly becoming the focus, consumers still expect a consistent (and consistently good) experience wherever they shop online. And that’s not just a question of using different devices. As an online retailer, you’re increasingly likely to have storefronts on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Etsy, or social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. It’s just as important to make the experience across all of these seamless and consistent, too.
Up to now, a ‘seamless experience across channels’ has widely been interpreted as keeping branding, design, types of content, pricing etc consistent. But the modern digital shopper expects more. Someone browsing on a mobile device during their commute wants to be able to pick up their shopping journey when they log onto a laptop later in the day, with the transition flawless. Providing this level of synchronisation across platforms requires not just consistency in design, but effective and consent-driven gathering and use of customer data – what is known as permissioned data. And that in turn depends on effective communication of the benefits customers get by agreeing to share their data.
3. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation
It’s hard to imagine any ‘top trends’ list across any industry or business function that doesn’t mention AI in 2025. eCommerce is no exception. As it is in so many other places, AI is revolutionising eCommerce by automating tasks and personalising customer interactions, not least by collecting and using permissioned data more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
Data has long been gold dust to retailers striving to keep up with the hyper-accelerated world of digital commerce, helping them to navigate consumer trends and make agile decisions based on concrete intelligence in close to real-time. AI takes the value of data to another level, not least because it can automate many of the most challenging tasks involved in data gathering and interpretation. Added to that, it can also act on insights independently, and handle ‘unstructured’ data forms such as human language that were previously beyond the reach of conventional analytics.
The use cases of AI in eCommerce are also multiplying rapidly. One of the first challenges for retailers is deciding where it can be most effective in their business. Many will have already heard of or explored the use of generative AI engines like ChatGPT for automating the creation of product descriptions, ad copy, and other high-volume content, or for running customer service chatbots.
Emerging avenues to explore include so-called ‘hyper-personalisation’, or the ability to deliver curated content and experiences tailored to the individual. Again, much of this depends on AI’s sophisticated capabilities to match behavioural data to historical sales trends, and from that a) make accurate predictions about what an individual likes and wants and b) trigger action in real-time.
AI will play a leading role in the evolution of first-party data gathering, creating automated feedback loops in which intelligence about the customer experience is continuously gathered at the individual levels from reviews, ratings, social posts, and sentiment analysis of interactions with staff/chatbots, with those insights then being harnessed for continual improvement and personalisation.
4. Harness the Power of Social Commerce
Social media platforms are no longer just advanced digital forums for talking to friends and sharing content. They are evolving into fully blown shopping destinations, with features like TikTok Shop allowing users not only to discover and browse products in social apps but also buy them directly.
‘Social buying’ is proving popular with younger generations in particular, who value the ability to complete purchases in the same apps they use for entertainment and connecting with friends. In one US study carried out by TikTok, the platform claimed that three in every four users are likely to make purchases while they use it, while 83% say TikTok plays a role in their purchasing decisions.
Most retailers and consumer brands already understand the value of social media for reaching the vast audiences they carry and have content strategies geared towards these platforms. Switching from a purely marketing focus to selling will involve extending these strategies to product listings, sales promotions and more. Again, many businesses are already used to extending their eCommerce presence beyond their own channels by using marketplaces. And platforms like Shopify make it easy to connect your web store to social media accounts to share product listings and integrate checkout.
Businesses looking to embrace TikTok in particular as well as rivals like Instagram Reels will have to pivot their content strategies towards video and livestreaming. Another aspect of social commerce that may be new to many retailers is the role of influencers in promoting and, increasingly, directly selling products via social channels. Influencers are the affiliate marketers and bloggers of the social sphere, but play a huge role in dictating traffic, reach and visibility, especially among younger audiences.
Keeping up with trends
The eCommerce landscape is ever-evolving, with new trends and technologies emerging regularly. One of the keys to long-term success is staying informed and being able to respond to dynamic and fluid market conditions rapidly and effectively. It’s a weighty task, but one that benefits from knowing where to find the right expertise, insight and help.
Get in touch with the Key Element eCommerce team and kick-start the conversation about where your digital operations are heading next.
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