What a year 2022 was! According to Entertainment and the New York Times, 2022 was a year of firsts. Take a look below at some of the highlights of the year – and read on to find out Jana’s predictions for 2023.
- Apple is the first company to reach a value of $3 trillion
- Puerto Rican model Sofia Jirau is the first woman with Down’s Syndrome to become a Victoria’s Secret model
- Will Smith publicly slaps Chris Rock at the Oscars
- An ice shelf collapses in East Antarctica
- Scientists capture an image of the Milky Way’s black hole
- Women referee at the men’s World Cup
- The jury rules in Johnny Depp’s favor against Amber Heard
- Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez tie the knot, 20 years after their erstwhile doomed romance
- Meta reported its first revenue decline since its IPO ten years ago. An aging user base and stiff competition from apps like TikTok are to blame.
- Three women are appointed to a Vatican committee that advises Pope Francis, and in Egypt, a woman is appointed adviser to the grand imam, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb
- A Neanderthal clan’s remains are found in a Russian cave
- Queen Elizabeth dies. Rishi Sunak replaces Liz Truss as the Prime Minister of the British Government, the first person of color to hold the position
2020 was horrific; Covid-19 put a dampener on the entire world. 2021 was not as bad, as countries learned to live with and around the virus. At the end of 2021, many people felt optimistic about 2022. Did the year disappoint? At the minimum, it was an eventful year!
What does 2023 hold for us – particularly in e-commerce and localization? Jana gives her end-of-year predictions for 2023. Read on below.
Predictions for 2023 in Artificial Intelligence
“AI and machine learning will be developed even more,” Jana proclaims. AI will get more sophisticated as a creative tool, and will be integral in content creation, keyword generation, image creation, blogs, and listing copywriting.
Jana’s prediction is supported by Forbes, which shows that two-thirds of organizations have poured money into AI this 2023, with investments expected to boost revenue by 30%+ until 2026. In fact, AI even helped Wieden+Kennedy create a campaign for Nike, by coming up with the ideas, which were then created by the agency. Tomorrow Sleep used an AI-powered content intelligence platform to identify which topics the company needed to explore, and how competitors ranked vs keywords and phrases. With the assistance of machine-learning algorithms, the project garnered a 10,000% increase in website traffic.
Nevertheless, AI is not yet ready to disrupt translations and localization. Jana notes that there are no good tools yet on the market. “AI takes one part of the text and translates what it thinks is important,” Jana explains. Although AI translators are developing very quickly, machine translations still cannot build human relationships, effectively translate humor and irony, or localize content to suit the specific flavor of a culture or people.
Translators can breathe a sigh of relief – they won’t be replaced by a bot any time soon.
Social Media Platforms Will Become Shopping Platforms
“Consumers display an increased interest in social purchasing,” Jana notes. TikTok is #1 at marrying social media and e-Commerce – check out our previous report on this topic. Jana notes that the TikTok consumer is financially independent, and eager to purchase – the antithesis to Facebook’s audience, an aging demographic that likes keeping in touch with friends and family through chat, commenting through status updates, joining Facebook groups of people with similar interests, and watching their children and grandchildren.
Jana believes that TikTok is a “very dominant shopping platform that will develop heavily next year.” In fact, 85% of brands surveyed in this study are increasing their ad spend on TikTok. If the platform solves many of the issues with data privacy, its growth will be magnified.
Time to Optimize for Voice Search
Look at this example of Voice Commerce from Rep:
Customer: “Alexa, tell ABC store to order a power bank for charging my phone”.
Alexa: “Sure, which brand and capacity of power bank would you like”?
Customer: “Order Samsung 10,000 mAh power bank”.
Alexa: “Great. Which color would you like”?
Customer: “What are the color options”?
Alexa: “It is available in silver, white and black. Which one would you like”?
Customer: “Send me a silver one”.
Alexa: “That will be $10.99. Would you like to get it”?
Customer: “Yes, please”.
Alexa: “Thank you for placing your order, it will be delivered to your address within 3 business days”.
You could be driving, cooking, walking the dog, or living your life. Voice Commerce will make shopping so much easier.
Jana believes sellers should optimize for voice search, since it’s likely going to be the norm in the future.
In 2019, 19% of customers made a voice purchase through Amazon Echo or another digital home assistant. According to Modev, this 2023, Voice Commerce is expected to achieve a 320% growth, or $19.4bn value. This new hands-free shopping brings e-commerce to a new level altogether: “Look, Ma, no hands!”
Sustainability is Crucial
In November, we published that Amazon Europe is moving towards more sustainable practices. The WWF reported to Forbes that it has a twofold strategy to address the US$700bn annual gap in financing for biodiversity – financing green, through greater investments in sustainable development and encouraging nature-positive activities from public, private, domestic, and international areas; and greening finance, by gaining the financial, public, and private support to conserve nature.
This train of thought is echoed by other countries – seven European funds threatened to withdraw $2-trillion worth of investments from Brazil if the latter didn’t take measures to protect the Amazon rainforest better. In the USA, there was a 450% increase in Google searches for sustainable products between 2016 and 2018.
The good news is, more than a third of global consumers are willing to pay extra for sustainable and environmentally-friendly alternatives. Young people have led this trend; 32% of millennials will choose a sustainable alternative, and Gen Z is well-recognized for leading the charge.
E-Commerce sellers should consider opting for sustainable practices – but to be wary of “greenwashing,” or when a company claims to be nature-proofing its business, but isn’t actually making any notable sustainability efforts. That’s the easiest way to lose the interest of a brand’s Gen Z market, which prices authenticity in the products it consumes.
Amazon Acquisitions
“Amazon is making acquisitions in all ports of our lives,” notes Jana. The company’s aggressive expansion worldwide isn’t limited to e-Commerce; it has taken over Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (2021), iRobot (2022) and One Medical (2022).
Considering the company’s humble beginnings in Jeff Bezos’ rental home in Washington, it’s come a long way. What will it do next? The monolith is expanding to other industries to become an integral part of people’s lives – as if it wasn’t already.
It remains to be seen where it will go next.