Retailers who stay updated in contextual commerce will benefit from higher conversion and increased sales

Technologies that support real-time happenings are trending on the digital radar today. People are also looking for anything that can work rapidly in the online market. With the changing mindset of humankind, contextual commerce is making a legendary entry into the diverse industries. It is predicted that the future of shopping will totally be through the emerging contextual commerce technology.

To whatever extend technology has reached, most of the world is still in the initial stage of adopting it as a major source. If we ask a retailer to channel his/her way of selling goods, they put their physical store first followed by digital. This mindset is bound to change with evolving innovation—a successful retailer views both digital and physical stores on the same plane. Henceforth, the idea of adopting contextual commerce is seeing high adoption. It is driving new opportunities and attracting a new set of audience and incremental transactions. Retailers who stay updated in the race will benefit from higher conversion and increased sales.

What is contextual commerce?

Contextual demand is the idea that consumers can buy anything, anytime, anywhere with the simple click of a button or voice response on their AI-powered device. It makes you shop when you are doing something else like cooking, reading, commuting, etc. Remarkably you can also shop using images that you saw somewhere.

Contextual commerce in the retail industry

Visual search is taking centre stage recently. It is making buyers' shopping options easy by filtering the dress or accessory they are looking for through visual search tools. For example, eBay has launched a visual search tool for its mobile application that not only lets you do normal online shopping but also gives you a whole new experience to find the perfect thing you are looking for. Other tech giants like Google and Amazon have also rolled out their visual search technology.

Chatbots are also making a remarkable stance as a contextual commerce tool. The face of online shopping is turning from typing lengthy sentences to a ‘one-word command.’ All you need to do is say the word and the shopping site brings you thousands of related results. The internal mechanism of automatic speech recognition (ASR) works in tandem with natural language processing (NLP) to allow machines to convert speech to text and then process the meaning of the captured phrases. Baidu, a Chinese company is leading the market in speech recognition technology. According to The Economist report, one in ten Baidu searches is conducted by voice. It is anticipated that people will feel weird thinking about how they used the keyboard to look for search options five years from now.

Unfolding the future in banking

As contextual commerce marked a milestone in the retail sector, it is slowly taking baby steps to invade the financial market. Many financial service providers and technology companies see great opportunities unfolding for contextual commerce. It can deliver add-on digital banking experiences contextually within their websites and apps to keep users in their ecosystem. Researchers also indicate that people are interested in banking contextually.