EBANX were at the Ecommerce Forum Brazil and had access to an exclusive content tailored to retailers and ecommerce merchants.

As part of the ninth edition at one of the most reputed events of the segment, EBANX listened to professionals from global enterprises and put together the main trends and challenges they all consider to be the future for ecommerce not only in Latin America but also in the world.

Personalization and Regionalization

In all sectors one thing is essential: comprehend customers preferences and needs is necessary to drive access and sales. For that, there are 3 main understandings you should have in mind:

Understand customer’s moment

According to Martin Barthel, Global Head of Facebook, your products need to find your customers and not the opposite. Matching the right product with the right person is the key for bigger conversions, and for that is necessary to understand their expectations when buying.

Understand customer’s purpose

For which purpose does your client need your product or service? German Carmona, Marketing Manager of GOL Airlines talked about two types of clients to exemplify the importance of answering this question: the traveler when searching for tourism services for a professional goal and when is looking just for leisure. The customer is the same, but the purpose is totally different, and it is merchant’s duty to understand those purposes to attend the specific needs of their clients at each moment of their journey.

Understand customer’s local preferences

As the user behavior differs from country to country, companies who are expanding globally need to regionalize their services and products to fit each culture and habits.

The CTO of Alibaba, Guo Dongbai, shared a real example that is used on the AliExpress website, where they limit the product exposure to customers according to their specific region, season period and special dates, which can increase sales in up to 70% according to a research showed by Felipe Mendes, Managing Director of GfK Mobile.

Machine Learning and AI

If personalization is needed, then Machine Learning and AI are the keys to achieve it. Amit Shah, CMO of 1-800-Flowers defined AI as the real accelerator of conversation and distribution, and more than that, a real accelerator of the one-on-one customer relationship. To him, merchants should apply AI to improve quality and agility at their services.

Aligned with AI, Machine Learning is also accelerating the process in all stacks, by learning with customers experiences, analyzing data and providing better solutions and personalized services to each one of them.

AI’s top tools that experts recommended:

• Bots as 24/7 assistants
• Messaging as a platform
• Voice skills sets
• Intelligent Agents

Mobile is the future

When talking about future and tendencies, all experts agreed about mobile being the future for ecommerce. According to Barthel, every vertical is, even if slowing, entering in m-commerce environment and it is necessary to adapt your strategy to that.

Amanda Bourlier, Consulting at Euromonitor International not only reinforce Barthel’s idea but also compliment by saying which are two things merchants should most pay attention when migrating to mobile: search and payments. Consumers want to find their products and services as fast as it possible and want to pay for that in a seamless and easy way.

However, it is important to say that consumers still prefer to pay for higher tickets purchases using desktop, but that the search for these services or products occurs on both platforms, desktop and mobile.

Partnerships: local commerce is becoming global

Is a fact all these technological advances and trends are enabling and facilitating the process for online business to become global, but at the same time are making local partnerships some essential part in their growth strategy.

AliExpress outsources all its operations to local partners in markets outside China, not having one single employee based at those places. In Latin America, for example, the company count on EBANX support, since 2013, to process local payment methods.

“At the end, your local partner is also your end consumer in that specific region. And who knows the preferences of their customers better than the customer itself?” – Guo Dongbai, CTO at Alibaba

Ready to expand globally?

More than payment methods, EBANX offers a complete package to international merchants to enter in Latin America, since customer service in their local language, marketing campaigns, our own payment products, and all the support needed with risk and compliance issues.