The Future of Online Shopping

On August 11th, 1994, a customer in Philadelphia bought Sting’s 4th album, Ten Summoner's Tales, for $12.48. Why did this matter? Because this was the first secure online transaction ever made: it was the birth of e-commerce as we know it.

Twenty-five years later, e-commerce has really grown up. That first purchase was a more complicated process than most of today’s online shoppers could muster. Luckily for the shopaholics among us, online transactions have evolved toward the end goal of becoming as frictionless as possible. From the development of Pay Pal in 1998, to the one-click checkouts that we have today, online shopping has become easier than any 90’s mall rat could imagine. Convenience is key to it all. It’s all about removing obstacles from shoppers and giving them fewer reasons to think twice about making a purchase. So, with all your heart’s desires just a click away, the question is: what’s next?

You might well try asking your smart phone. “Hey Siri?”

Voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are finding their way into our hands and homes. Voice-enabled smart phones aside, Statista estimates that smart speaker household penetration rate in the United States will rise from 35% today to 75% by 2025. And consumers are using this technology to shop. Today, 18 million US consumers have made some form of voice payment, and Business Insider projects that this will quadruple over the next five years. These projections will depend on consumers’ growing comfort level in using voice technology and its ability to offer increased convenience.

One of the key barriers to adopting this technology is the concern around privacy. Common worries like; “Is Alexa spying on me?” and “what is she doing with my data?” Certainly, privacy is a hot issue for many tech giants at the moment. Today, most voice-assistant use is centered around small tasks like setting timers, playing music and checking the weather. This will change as we move through the technology adoption process. In the very near future, we'll see voice assistants being used for more and more involved tasks – aided in part by features that improve user security. Indeed, features like voice-authentication promise to offer increased security over passwords. 

But the real sell with voice-assistance is the convenience potential. Not only does it allow users to make purchases when they might be engaged in other tasks – say ordering milk while they’re cleaning out the fridge – it helps them to make purchases while they’re top of mind. This is more convenient for the user, who likely wouldn’t have remembered that he was out of milk until he went to make coffee the next morning. Importantly, it also allows Amazon to win a sale which otherwise might have been lost to the convenience store across the street.

This is just the beginning for voice technology. Business Insider predicts that voice payments will continue to “evolve from clunky and poorly scripted sessions to interactions as natural as one might have with a personal shopper or bank employee.”