As we get stuck into the first quarter of 2025, retailers of all sorts will find themselves facing a range of issues. While the bells have long been sounding the death of the high-street, many ecommerce businesses are also having a tough time and are being forced to use fresh, innovative strategies.
To make this process a little easier, it can be helpful to check out some of the emergent trends that businesses in the ecommerce sector are successfully embracing. From a focus on customer loyalty to staying stuck on sustainability, we spoke to the team at Fluid Commerce on what to be aware of.
Increased focus on customer loyalty
One trend that we’re seeing in early 2025 is an increased focus on customer loyalty. With the price of customer acquisition on the rise, ecommerce businesses are having to reconceptualise their approach to loyalty altogether.
It’s no longer efficient to seek one-off customers, and long-term relationships are becoming almost as important in B2C as it is in B2B. Brands are seeking to integrate themselves further and further into consumers’ lives, focusing on a relational rather than purely transaction-based model.
The power of apps
Customers nowadays expect to be able to interact with businesses – even ecommerce ones – through a range of different channels. With those in the ecommerce sector, those channels will obviously all be online, but they can take different forms such as newsletters, social media and customer service chatbots.
An increasingly dominant trend is to use apps to improve and strengthen the customer-brand relationship. By working with trusted development partners to create and maintain these apps, businesses stand to improve customer loyalty, while also providing the perfect environment for customers to browse the business’s products.
AI-powered personalisation
While AI-powered chatbots aren’t exactly new, they’re only now being taken to new levels. With AI interfaces becoming increasingly slick, and their capacity to provide genuinely useful, personalised advice only standing to rise, we can expect to see ecommerce sites leveraging these powerful tools more and more over the coming months.
This will likely lead to previously unthought-of levels of personalisation. That being said, retailers must maintain a transparent and ethical policy when it comes to how customer data is used, if they want to maintain a relationship of trust.
Sustainability
Lastly, in 2025 sustainability is continuing to strengthen its hold over consumers. It’s no longer an optional extra in most cases – it’s a basic necessity to show at least some commitment to socially and environmentally sustainable practices.
Of course, how this is carried out and communicated will differ depending on your target audience. It will be far more of a priority in certain niches than others. Regardless, it’s important to do research early on to make sure that your approach is in line with the expectations of your customers.
These trends are only a few among the many that we can expect to witness over the coming months. It’s important to look into both more general trends and those which are specific to your niche, in order to make sure that you don’t miss out on any important opportunities in 2025.
