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The 10 Most Important E-commerce Trends in 2025
Welcome back from Christmas dinner and New Year's ditto. We hope the worst holiday stress has subsided, and you are ready for a new year in the name of e-commerce. If not, this article will surely get you all the way back. We’ll go through the most important trends of the new year –Let's dive into it!
1. Web Accessibility
We start with a trend that is more of a must than a should. The EU has tightened the screw with their web accessibility directive. The Parliament has set a deadline for when European webshops must be accessible to everyone. The cut-off date is June 28th, and by then your webshop must comply with more than 70 different guidelines for good web design. Which exact guidelines are not particularly clearly formulated in typical EU style, but it certainly can't go wrong if you lean on the WCAG standard.
And yes, it may sound like a chore, but maybe it's not so bad to ensure that you can complete a purchase without a mouse on your site, or make sure that a blind person can also navigate your site. 1 in 6 people have a greater or lesser disability. And it's also not bad for your SEO, as it brings more traffic and ultimately higher sales for your site.
2. AI
You probably guessed that this one would be on the list. Artificial intelligence is almost impossible to avoid. Hardly a week goes by without the boundaries of what can be generated with simple prompts are pushed. In 2025, the technology will be more mature, faster, better, and create fewer images with 6-8 fingers on hands. However, this is not the biggest AI trend. No, it will be the concrete solutions that actually create results. In 2025, it is no longer enough to talk about AI if you cannot build solutions that actually work and create value.
The technology is ready, so now it's time to unleash it. It could for example write your image captions, categorize your searches, or organize your customer inquiries. 2025 is the future that the past years' webinars on "The Future of e-commerce" have been all about.
3. B2B E-commerce Becomes More Like B2C
It is a development that has been going on for a long time, but we are really starting to see it happen. It turns out that B2B buyers shop online in their spare time. They have become accustomed to how easy it can be to shop B2C, and they would like to see that in their work life as well. A really interesting and also slightly scary statistic that supports this is that 60% of buyers prefer to shop via webshops, but only 35% of sellers provide that option to customers. That is a gap of 25%. The only place where the mismatch in preferences is greater is with the traveling salesman. 53% of companies that sell use traveling salesmen. But only 22% of buyers like to use that solution. Ouch. By comparison, B2C customers aren’t eager to buy from door-to-door sales.
In 2025, the energy should be put into developing good customer-friendly webshops that give B2B buyers more of the shopping experience they are used to when they shop privately.
4. Less Composable, but More Connected
Composable Commerce has long been one of the most buzzing buzzwords in e-commerce. And for good reason. The idea of being able to assemble a best-of-breed solution that is easy to pivot with and expand is very appealing. The idea is great, but the reality often looks different. Fully composable setups quickly become unmanageable, and it is almost impossible to judge which system is actually the best – especially when it comes to which is best in conjunction with other systems. In 2024, Chiefmartec counted the marketing systems in the market right now and counted 14,106 different systems. Find the needle in that tech stack.
We have therefore become advocates for connected composable, where you go for a composable setup based on a well-tested foundation. This means that your e-commerce solution has an operational core of systems that are verified to work well together. These systems are still built composable, so it is still easy to connect new microservices and systems, but your entire setup is not a fragile patchwork because you know that the foundation always works. Connected Composable shortens time-to-market and gives you greater security.
5. Going Abroad
We are now really starting to see successful e-commerce solutions become a springboard for the internationalization of companies. In Scandinavia, companies like Matas and BabySam have made a name for themselves with large acquisitions across the Nordics in the past year. This is partly because they have achieved digital maturity with web solutions that can easily be expanded and consolidated with new markets. It requires solid data structures to take in new companies that are not necessarily controlled by the same ERP systems and data logic. It requires a flexible foundation for the business that can easily be expanded and adopt a new business branch. If the foundation is in order, it provides the opportunity to start an export adventure that can grow far beyond national borders. That is the fantastic thing about e-commerce: national borders are just gateways to a larger customer base.
In 2025, more companies with mature e-commerce and omnichannel will make significant acquisitions abroad.
6. Will Temu Lose Steam?
There are opportunities abroad, but there are also those who see it more as a threat. It has probably not escaped anyone's notice that the Chinese wonderland of cheap junk, Temu, has had its triumph. They are on the most used webshop in the Nordics despite repeated warnings about poor product safety and quality. The question is whether the development will continue unabated or whether consumers have reached a saturation point. 3 out of 4 Danes are concerned about product safety. And 6 out of 10 would not be happy with a Christmas gift bought from Temu. At the same time, there are also many horror stories about terrible return systems and non-existent customer service. You don't have to read Temu's Trustpilot for long to understand why their NPS is a horrible -8.
It will be exciting to follow their development in 2025. Will customers return and buy again, or have they been burned one too many times by the Chinese dragon? We believe that Temu will start to lose ground again – just as we saw with Wish a few years ago.
7. Hyper-Personalization
Here comes something not very shocking: People love content that is tailored just for them. Now we have far greater opportunities to give them that. However, it requires that we build content differently in our CMSs. In the future, two users will never be met with the same page. It must be tailored to the individual's preferences to a higher degree. It requires a build-up of your sites that consists much more of dynamic content blocks than today. Each of these blocks can, in principle, look in thousands of ways. Depending on whether the visitor to your site is interested in handbags or headwear. An image on your site is not just one image. It is a catalog of customization options for the individual visitor, so you are always as relevant as possible. Because honestly, who wants to look at riding boots if they are crazy about badminton? When webshops have 10,000+ items to navigate, personalized assistance is necessary, otherwise, the customer gets indecisive and fatigued.
8. Sustainability
There is no doubt that sustainability is important and is talked a lot about in the industry, but the question is why it is talked about? For consumers, it has taken up the same amount of space for a long time. Since 2019, it has been about 50% of consumers who believe that sustainability has great or some significance when they shop online. It does not move decisively in one direction or the other, but when you ask consumers about their primary reasons for shopping online, sustainability is not at the top. It is the price of the item – more specifically that it is cheaper online. The price overshadows sustainability for the general consumer. However, this does not change the fact that there is a group for whom sustainability is very important. The big sustainability trends probably come from legislative pressure, as there are many regulations right now. Consumer protection is cracking down on greenwashing, and there are rules on the way about both extended producer responsibility for packaging handling and Digital Product Passports. Sustainability is increasingly becoming a condition and something everyone has to deal with. It is becoming part of the basic rule set.
9. Security
Unfortunately, the internet has not become a safer place to be in recent years. There are more and more cunning methods to deprive innocent people of their savings and personal information. At the same time, it has become very costly not to have control over where your users' data is and exactly what it is used for. GDPR has ensured that. Security has only become more important for you and your customers in recent years. This also means that it has become extremely important for suppliers to be able to document that they handle data correctly and that no one risks a leak of important information. The ISAE 3000 certification, for example, has become highly sought after. It is simply too expensive and too risky to work with suppliers who cannot meet the security requirements of our complex digital world.
10. Retail Media
Retail Media continues to be a trend – and it does so simply because it makes sense for both advertisers and online stores that provide digital ad space. Statista estimates that digital Retail Media advertising in Europe will more than double from 2022 to 2026, from approximately 11 billion euros to 24 billion euros. That is a wild amount of money and is well on its way to becoming one of the most important revenue sources for major online stores.
Even for customers, retail media can be positive because it can potentially introduce them to entirely new products, they might be interested in. However, it is important that digital stores stick to endemic products in their advertising. This means products they could already have considered selling. Otherwise, the advertising undermines the store's brand and consumer trust. Kicks can easily showcase perfumes through retail media, but they should not start selling all-inclusive trips to Morocco. That would weaken the brand.
Thank you for reading
And so, it looks at the entrance to 2025. We, of course, give no guarantees on how the future will develop, but it could easily look like this.
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