[Huawei Developers] Martin Bieber:
The retail industry is undergoing a monumental shift. Brick-and-mortar stores and traditional high streets around the world have experienced a gradual decline over recent years due to shoppers preferring to buy goods online. Enforced retail closures and worldwide lockdowns have only served to accelerate consumers’ shift towards online shopping. While these behaviour shifts have spelled problems for many retailers struggling to attract and retain traditional customer bases, it’s also opening exciting opportunities for businesses that are ready and willing to launch into a new age of online retail.

The changing world of e-commerce

It’s no secret that online shopping, also known as e-commerce, continues to represent a growing share of the retail industry. According to Digital Commerce 360, Research and Market Statistics, global ecommerce sales through all channels reached a total $3.53 trillion in sales by the end of 2019, and that growth rate of 20% is expected to extend into the foreseeable future – by 2040, it is expected that 95% of all purchases will be made online. While international giants such as Amazon and Alibaba are often the first to spring to mind when thinking about online retailers, there are an estimated 1214 million e-commerce websites across the globe, with more coming online every day.

New consumer trends are shaping how online retailers conduct their business. People are increasingly looking to their smartphones and mobile apps to find and buy products, and high-quality, tailored content on retail platforms is becoming the baseline expectation for consumers. Furthermore, consumers are growing more familiar with new technology such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence and are looking for online retail platforms that integrate these capabilities.

With such a competitive market dominated by a core group of leading marketplaces, and consumers expecting more innovative experiences from their mobile phones, merchants will need to look at new and unique ways of piquing the interests of prospective customers and improving customer conversion rates. In this sense, new and innovative technology can help online sellers create more interactive and intelligent online shopping experiences and find new ways of gaining new customers.

Earlier this month, Huawei’s annual developer conference, HDC 2020, looked at how AppGallery and Huawei are helping developers in the e-commerce sector address these challenges and succeed in a continually changing industry, and we’ve summarized some of the key trends and insights from the conference.

How to stick out from the crowd and gain new customers

It’s an age-old challenge for retailers of all shapes, sizes, and sectors – how to attract and retain new customers. Having quality products or low prices can only get you so far in the modern day, and the saturated online market makes it hard for retailers to get noticed.

As more and more consumers gravitate to mobile and smartphone technology, Huawei understands that the success of its app marketplace, AppGallery, and its wider ecosystem is dependent on the success of its developers and partners. That is why it allocates extensive resources and has implemented a range of measures to help merchants drive traffic onto their platforms. Huawei offers cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to drive more intelligent shopping solutions and enable retailers to create more tailored shopping services for their customers. For example, its Precision Marketing feature uses Push Kit and ML to ensure marketing is carried out in the most precise manner to accurately reach the right audiences. The Intelligent Shopping function, combines product display, customer searching, reviewing, and purchasing to drive sales, while the Smart Photo Searching feature utilises deep learning technologies to help customers easily find the products they want through an image search rather than relying on outdated text-based search options. AR also enables a ‘try before you buy’ feature, which allows consumers to use their smartphone camera to place products into real-life scenarios. This enables consumers to understand the functions and design of a product and to view how it would look in the ‘real environment’, such as viewing a new piece of furniture in their lounge of living room.

These solutions are helping deliver tangible success for AppGallery partners. Banggood, one of the largest cross-border ecommerce apps in South East China, implemented the Smart Photo feature to allow customers to quickly and easily find specific items in its extensive product selection, leading to a much smoother shopping experience and a higher visit-to-purchase conversion rate.

These features are complemented by the wide range of innovative capabilities available through HMS Core, Huawei’s toolkit for developers, which also help drive more intelligent targeting. Huawei’s Ads, Push, Scan, and Analytics Kits enable retailers to deliver targeted campaigns such as advertising, push notifications, and QR code-based coupons. For example, Lenta, the largest hypermarket and supermarket chain in Russia, uses push notifications to remind customers of discounts, leading to the app’s 16 million active users increase expenditure by 3%.

Furthermore, for e-commerce brands that rely solely on web-based platforms, Huawei’s Quick Apps help platforms become smartphone compatible by allowing developers to wrap an existing web-based store into an app that is present in AppGallery, all in under an hour.

These resources are in addition to the unparalleled marketing support, promotional opportunities, and branding resources Huawei and AppGallery offer its partners to help them attract new users throughout AppGallery’s 490 million monthly active users. KUMU, a community platform where you can get paid by becoming a live streamer, demonstrated how apps can take full advantage of AppGallery’s in-app resources after it featured in Top Banners, Flash Screens, and recommended app lists. KUMU also launched joint marketing promotions with Huawei, including a Mother’s Day campaign and an AppGallery KOL contest, which resulted in premium users increasing 220%; IAP revenue increasing 40-fold; and a reach of more than 1million users.

Creating a more immersive and visual experience for consumers

Gone are the days when online retailers could simply list products on their website and trust that new customers will click through and make a purchase. While this model might work for established online marketplaces that have thousands of products at competitive prices, smaller players need to do more to truly engage users and differentiate themselves from the swarm of competitors.

That is why Huawei focuses on providing platforms and retailers with the tools and resources to create a more intelligent user experience, without the need for extensive technical expertise and expensive software. There are many ways to utilise technology to improve user experience, but one method that has been proven to boost user acquisition and customer conversion rates is live commerce, where a seller presents a product to a live online audience of prospective customers.

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Earlier this year Huawei launched a new live commerce solution to help make ground-breaking technology accessible to online retailers without using costly and resource-intensive studio equipment. The solution combines some of Huawei’s most innovative technology such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (HiAI) to enable online retailers to create more immersive and intelligent visual experiences. For example, Huawei’s powerful AR capabilities can create an advanced visualization experience, where chosen products can be displayed separately to those being shown by the presenter. Meanwhile, HiAI also revolutionizes the consumer experience by allowing the use of scenario-based sales, such as the presenter setting alternative backdrops to their live stream. The solution also enables presenters to use a second camera position that is perfect for showing alternative shots for modelling products, while enhanced 5G and Wi-Fi capabilities help deliver a faster and smoother live stream.

As the e-commerce and retail industry continues to evolve, AppGallery and Huawei is committed to helping retailers of all shapes and sizes keep pace with ongoing changes in the sector and embrace new technology to succeed in today’s online world.