8 Consumer Shopping Trends for the Future
Consumer shopping trends have changed gradually over several years. In turn, brands have responded positively to change with more advanced transformations to satisfy the prevailing consumer shopping trends. This blog will highlight several outstanding consumer shopping trends, likely to improve as the year progresses.
Change is inevitable, especially when it comes to the habits of consumers in different economic setups. Understanding the prevailing consumer habits enables you, the producer create reliable strategies to meet your target customers. Most essentially, being up to date with technological and economic changes helps you prepare for upcoming consumer trends.
Here are eight consumer shopping trends for the future:
Trend #1: Live Shopping
Live shopping is the newest yet most popular consumer shopping trend globally. In this category, shopping happens entirely across online shopping platforms, where retailers sell products to consumers.
Live shopping boasts plenty of benefits to both consumers and sellers, including:
- Offers a more digitalized shopping experience.
- Generates great sales in the long run as it inspires impulse buying.
- Creates brand awareness.
- Accommodates nearly all businesses.
- Enhances consumer-seller engagement level.
Trend #2: Online Shopping
With advanced technology, consumers have made online shopping more significant than traditional physical shopping. Online shopping (a part of e-commerce) allows consumers to window shop and acquire products from different countries to be delivered to their current location conveniently.
The trend incorporates various payment methods and channels of delivery. Shoppers have shifted their love to online shopping due to its benefits, from saving time and money to convenience and easy price comparison for different websites.
Trend #3: Greater Brand Awareness
Another trend witnessed across consumers is the shift from shopping through retailers, distributors, or wholesalers to engaging the brand directly. Consumers want to buy directly from the brand, which seems much easier for them in terms of better buyer-seller relationships, cutting the intermediaries’ costs, and improved customer service.
Other benefits of direct consumer-brand connection include product quality maintenance, a wider shopping base, and better management of consumer issues.
Trend #4: Advocacy for Ethical Issues and Sustainability
Consumers have probably never been sensitive to sustainability and ethical issues like they are in the 21st century. Most consumers want products to be more than 50% sustainable for the environment and unquestionably maintain ethical matters.
Producers can reveal sustainability and ethics by using organic raw and recyclable materials, producing safe products for human health, and maintaining a clean production process. On the other side, ethics in consumer products can be shown through the proper behaviour of the producers.
Additionally, they can maintain community values and discourage discrimination and harassment in any workplace. In the current life, consumers will only buy from ethical and sustainable producers.
Trend #5: Social Media Platforms
Another significant habit in consumer shopping is using social media platforms to discover new products. Gone are when consumers would undertake window shopping to find products.
Currently, a consumer will peruse various social media platforms in search of a particular product and later purchase it either physically or online. On the other side, retailers have intensified the use of these platforms to present various products in the market to satisfy the need.
Trend #6: Monthly Subscriptions
Consumers have made monthly subscriptions the order of the day for plenty of products across the market. The system has been popular due to its bountiful benefits from a more predictable billing, reduced regular costs, minimizes the stress associated with consistent payments, and boosted consumer-client relationships.
Some popular platforms that allow monthly subscriptions include:
- Netflix and other movie and TV show streaming services
- Spotify.
- Dollar Shave Club.
- National Geographic.
- Sellfy.
- Podia,
- Shopify.
- Wix.
- WooCommerce.
Trend #7: Influencer Effect
Consumers in the current generation significantly rely on influencers to discover products, make shopping decisions, and choose their best brands.
For instance, a consumer will go for products strongly advertised by a certain influencer through their social media platform or paid TV ads. The trend has greatly contributed to the current high growth of influencers across such platforms.
Trend #8: Other consumer shopping trends
Consumer shopping trends are constantly evolving. They are often influenced by social, psychological, economical, cultural, and personal factors. Let’s go over each trend more specifically:
Social factors
They are associated with the influence that human beings have on one another concerning various shopping techniques, significantly affecting the trends. Some social factors include family setups or status.
Psychological factors
Psychological factors play a vital role in consumer shopping behaviour by influencing one’s motivation, attitude, beliefs, and perception of certain products.
Economic factors
The prevailing financial condition greatly affects consumer shopping trends. For instance, when the economy is stable, consumers will likely purchase more and cope with new and fancier trends to make shopping more enjoyable.
Personal factors
Sometimes, consumer shopping trends solely depend on one’s unique attributes, such as age, lifestyle, occupation, and income.
Cultural factors
Culture greatly influences various life issues, including consumer shopping trends. Certain cultural practices will push consumers to maintain a particular habit or develop new ones to suit their needs. An example of cultural factors affecting consumer shopping trends is social class.
