Modern life nowadays is closely knitted with the virtual life. Basically our life today is a symbiosis of our real and virtual life. For example, you can use different services at home or at the office not leaving it. You can order food, apparel or concert tickets. Almost all types of the goods are available online. Buying and selling products over Internet is commonly known as e-commerce (electronic commerce). It was invented by Michael Aldrich in 1979. He was the first person who invented online shopping, deep respect to that person. Since that time lots of changes have taken place. E-commerce has grown and became important part of our life. Some of us are the consumers and some of us are e-commerce business owners.
So what are the hot e-commerce trends right now? In this article I will cover just one related to e-commerce as well as mobile commerce – gifting. To start with, I would like to mention one event that might seem not quite e-commerce related, but believe me, it is. World’s biggest social network Facebook, I’m sure that you’ve heard of it, entered social commerce. The social giant that earned money only from advertising launched a new service that is called “Gifts”. Service allows Facebook users to send real gifts to their friends via the website. The user is allowed to send a gift directly from the reminder about friend’s upcoming birthday page or from his friend profile page. Those who are willing to send a gift would be redirected to Facebook Gift service page where would be able to choose a suitable gift for the friend and add a text message with congratulations.
A somewhat similar service launched by Amazon. Shortly after Facebook rolled out Gift service in USA, e-commerce world giant announced a new feature – Friends and Family Gifting. The feature allows users to connect their Facebook accounts to Amazon to keep track of friends and family birthdays and anniversaries, as well as their shopping wish lists. Ones user connects his/ her Facebook account, he/ she will be able to see all wish lists that your connections have created on Amazon and the information about all goods that you connections liked through Facebook. User also can opt to receive reminders about upcoming anniversaries or birthdays. For those Amazon customers that either don’t have a Facebook account or don’t wish to synchronize their Facebook account with Amazon, there is an option to add friends manually.
With this gifting trend coming from Facebook Gifts, Amazon, Sincerely, Wantful, Wrapp.com, DropGifts and other making news services no surprise that ordinary e-commerce store owners feel like joining the trend. The good news is that there is no need to develop expensive software from scratch. Say, magento.ikantam.com, an e-commerce software company, offers a low cost Magento gifting extension. Similar solutions are available for other popular open source e-commerce platforms.
Both events to my mind play an important role in contemporary e-commerce. E-commerce smoothly knitted with numerous social platforms and called E-Gifting – is one of the Hottest trends in e-commerce.
