E-commerce and The New Kid on The Block
Since the Amazon and eBay launches of 1995, who could have predicted the growth in online shopping? As technology has improved with an amazing pace, so has the way of targeting customers within online retail. Of course, an essential ingredient for all this has been good SEO (we have some great blogs on SEO here). We have all trod the road to discovering the perfect ranking recipes, keeping pace with the clever evolution of the google search algorithms. A move towards sustainable and professional approaches to search optimisation has helped with this, but there is a new kid on the block and her name is Voice Search! With a massive variety of predictions on how this will impact online retail, how seriously should the e-commerce sector take this development?
I have my own theories and fantasies on how Voice Search linked with artificial intelligence and augmented reality could give us an amazing shopping experience, but we will come to that later! The e-commerce sector has always seen steady growth but post COVID-19 we have seen a boom in online sales out of necessity. Online retailers that have invested heavily in their e-commerce systems, making them as frictionless as possible found their investment in online shopping paid back handsomely within this period. Those that did not invest in the latest e-commerce technologies were unfortunately deep in catch up mode. I think we can see where online retail is going and that it will only get bigger with time, also, the shopping experience with new technologies will only get more engaging with better experiences. So keeping this in mind, is voice search one of those enablers that can bring a better experience for your customers and prove to be a wise investment for sales? How will Voice search fit in the e-commerce game plan and how far ahead will their vision need to be to capitalise on this rapidly developing technology?
Dealing with Predictions
The predictions are varied depending on who you listen to! Let's see some retrospective facts before we look at some predictions you usually see pop up in a google search.
Some Past Data:
2018 Google report: 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile.
2018 brightlocal.com report: 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last 12 months and 76% of smart speaker users perform local searches at least weekly—with 53% searching using these devices every day.
2019 Voicebot.AI report: 58% of online adults have used voice search and 33% were using it monthly in early 2019, up from just over 25% in monthly reported use.
Some Predictions:
“OC&C estimates that $40bn (in the USA) and $5bn (in the UK) will be spent through voice commerce by 2022, representing 6% and 3% of all online spend.”
2016 comScore Report predicted 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020
2017 ComScore reports prediction: Comscore Senior Director of Emerging Products Susan Engleson examined how consumers are interacting with voice-enabled devices. It was said 'More than half of all smartphone users will be engaging with voice search technology in 2020. Now, this sound bite has been echoed throughout many articles and is just a small snippet lifted from the examination. But nevertheless, we are here, 2020 is in full flow so let's see what this year brings!
A 2018 study from Juniper Research believes that there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 billion at the end of 2018.
A 2017 Gartner report stated that about 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020, now, they did also say “By 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and conversational user interfaces.” Now, I’m not to sure if we are at that point yet, (I suppose this depends on your relationship with your spouse!) but as you can see, there has been some bold predictions. In July 2019 Adobe released a survey data in July that found 48% of consumers are using voice for “general web searches.” This is for everything, like driving directions and making a call, obviously not just for ordering online. It will be interesting to see the hard data on this in 2021 for the predictions of 2020/2023. We will put a report together for you on this in the first quarter of 2021, so we can compare some of these predictions with actual hard evidence.
The Seeds of Voice Search
The foundation of all this 'Voice Recognition' has been around for quite some time. In 1952 Bell Laboratories created the first speech recognition system that could recognise numbers. Moving forward to 1997 and Dragon Dictate launched their dictation to text software on Windows, and so we have had a march to Voice-enabled equipment. But it was not until the smartphone boom and Google releasing a voice recognition app in 2008, did things really start hotting up. IBM’s Watson made a stir in 2010, Apple released Siri in 2011 for the iPhone 4s, Microsoft Cortana followed in 2014 and then came the Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Samsung’s Bixby. Other voice assistants crashing the party include Alice from Yandex, and AliGenie from Alibaba. So, this should be the next big clue for us all; if you have all this investment by such massive companies, you know it's going to go somewhere, the juggernaut has started and I can't see it slowing down. You may need a crystal ball to predict how fast it will be, and what directions it will take, but one thing is for sure, they have all set course and it's only ever going to go one way! Voice technology still has a long way to go, but it has made immense strides already and I feel we will really see big advances over the next five years.
What Will Fuel Growth?
Not counting all the speech-enabled phone devices that are out there, we now have devices that are designed solely for voice interaction and search. Alexa devices have sold over 100 million since its general release in 2015 and all other voice devices are gaining massive popularity. But what will fuel the growth of Voice Search and how will it get better? Well, that's all down to AI. It's AI that powers virtual assistants, the two are married together to give you the voice search experience. To propel voice search into the fabric of everyday use by everyone it has to get better, and it will. As the power of computing increases so will their ability to crunch big data. Contextual learning will increase and the AI behind voice technology will leap forward. This is where things become more native, they will flow better, and the voice assistant will be able to understand more complex conversational language. Advancements in AI and Machine Learning will have a huge impact on how we interact with our smart devices and search the internet. Google’s RankBrain is designed to recognise words and phrases to predict outcomes. When it hears a phrase it has never encountered before it makes an educated guess, then tries to match it as best it can. This has the learning process feedback loop that improves the more it is used, giving it the ability to learn and answer unexpected voice searches. The better these voice devices become, the more people will find them easy to use and therefore they will start relying on them for daily activities. This is when you will see the expediential growth as you will find all of sudden you will not be able to live without one.
Who is using it already?
On the services side, Jetson is an early runner in providing businesses with voice commerce services. This service allows businesses to set up a profile with them and upload products. This information is then available to customers using their voice-enabled devices to make purchases.
On the retail side, Walmart made headlines by announcing its partnership with Google to launch the Walmart Voice Order. With the help of Google Assistant, you can now order your shopping via voice. Although this is a move in the right direction, these sort of services are more like shopping list extras you can add to your cart, and I don't think this would translate so well within the highly visual products.
Amazon brought the voice search to 'Whole Foods’ and like the Walmart/Google platform, customers can ask Alexa to add items to their grocery list. Also, you can now order most of your shopping off Amazon through Alexa. If you use Alexa in conjunction with your fire stick you can then see all the visuals that you are ordering, definitely a step in the right direction for me. The plus point here for Amazon is that it owns the whole ecosystem, therefore it can create a very slick process. These are just two instances of many trying to figure this space out. For me, many e-commerce platforms will need a visual connection to support the initial Voice Search to make it a more powerful experience. H&M launched a shopping guide, Estee Lauder introduced custom-made skincare solutions through voice activation, and British online fashion and cosmetics retailer ASOS is forging forward with Enki. ASOS’ Senior Product Manager Jason Gregory is very bullish about Voice Search, so I feel we will see constant forward momentum from ASOS in the future. With the help of Google Assistant, Enki serves up its users their latest collections via their phones. All you have to do is say "Hey Google, talk to ASOS" and Enki will talk you through the latest products, sending you all the items you like to your smartphone to browse. As mentioned earlier, the potential king of all of this is Amazon. They already use AI to entice you to buy, a staggering 35% of their sales come from their AI recommendation engine. They have a fantastically capable voice assistant in Alexa, and you can already use her to order your products off Amazon. With the investment capital that Amazon has, it will be interesting to see how they harness voice search for both SEO and their own voice-enabled products. Again as I intimated to earlier I think there is a bigger picture and that is the integration of Voice Search, AI, big data and visual enhancements like augmented reality. For if these technologies merge into one search system seamlessly, it will make for a truly compelling experience!
Some Challenges in E-commerce
Product Discovery:
Product discovery seems to be a challenge for most companies. We have talked about how the correct product data is critical, integration with AI and Information Management Systems may be the way forward for this.
Conversion Rates:
A big challenge facing retailers right now is how to increase conversion rates. According to Fireclick index findings, The average e-commerce conversion rate globally is at 2.58%. Again, better AI would help this situation in many ways.
High Return Rates:
Return rates for online purchases can be as high as 50% - 80% of first-time customers and can result in them not shopping on the website again. This is where amazing images, exact sizing and precise descriptions come in. This is the big one for me, and I feel this can be alleviated by Voice, AI and visual systems.
Some Challenges in Voice Search
Conversational Phrases:
Earlier I mentioned just one of the challenges, which is for Voice search to understand better conversational phrases. The internet trends report by Mary Meeker’s found that almost 70% of these searches used natural or conversational language. So, we can see the trend is growing which should be the big prompt for us all to optimise for this type of search too. Remember, writing a question in a search engine can be very different from saying it. We have subtle differences in context that need to be addressed at the SEO level (yes, back to SEO again!) It's a good idea to be looking at this now to make sure you are keeping up with voice search optimisation trends.
Voice to Data Inconsistencies:
Currently, the feedback from retail customers on Voice Search is that it lacks accurate product images and there is a difficulty in comparing and researching products with correct information. For these gaps to be plugged that would mean rethinking web systems, data and SEO. AI companies like vue.ai are trying to make sense of this for the fashion industry by fixing these kinds of problems. vue.ai is an end-to-end retail automation platform that is redesigning the future of retail with Artificial Intelligence. Using Image Recognition and Data Science they extract catalogue data and analyse it with user behaviour to improve customer experiences.
Summary
As I draw to the end of this article, I can’t help but think voice search for e-commerce is an exciting place to be at the moment. It’s all to play for, and the companies that get it right have a lot to gain! As we can see, trawling the internet for stats and predictions can be interesting, but one thing is for sure, it all seems to be heading in one direction. The speed and the numbers may vary, but the new girl on the block looks to be winning the hearts and minds of the big hitters in technology and search, and also the forward-thinking digital marketers. There are a lot of AI technology companies working hard at this. I'm guessing Google is the starting point, after all, most of all our searches start there. The ability to use a bespoke system, leveraging existing AI solutions like Google is an intriguing proposition. You also have interesting companies like vue.ai that look to have exciting offerings. One thing is for sure, voice search will become the norm in years to come, so it makes sense to start and look at how you can best position yourself in this sector of search.
If you would like to see our 'How to Optimise Your SEO For Voice' have a look at this Bog post.
If you would like to see my ‘A Fantasy Vision of Voice Search in Fashion Retail’ blog, where I run you through what I think we will be able to achieve in the not so distant future, then please follow this link here.
And here are some links to some interesting related topics: