Online Shopping’s Future Trend: Voice Commerce

Online shopping is a rapidly growing sector that also faces rapid change and innovation. Voice features are the current trend and innovations in this sector. Most importantly, voice search. Currently, consumers do searches, purchases, and redirect to other pages using their voice without a keyboard. All of this is possible with the improvement of voice commerce.

What Is Voice Commerce?

Voice commerce is an eCommerce technology that allows the end-users to do searches, purchases using online voice commands.

This technology has been in significant growth over the last years. In the following, there is more detailed information about voice commerce.

Firstly, voice technology allows users to as but not limited to make reservations for events, make appointments, search products, order food, search for locations, tell the weather, play music, send messages or emails, and add products to users’ carts.

How Does It Work?

Voice commerce consists of Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), Speech Authentication Technologies. Speech Recognition enables the client to recognise and translate speech into text, and Text-to-Speech converts text to speech. Speech authentication identifies users by listening to their unique voices and eliminates the need for PINs or passwords. The ease of voice commerce technology is reflected in the numerical statistics as well. For example, researchers say 20% of grocery shopping is voice-based, with 17% in electronics and 8% in clothing. Voice-based shopping is expected to grow by $40 billion in 2022.

Ease of Use

Applying voice search is about 3x faster than a text search. Therefore, it is a technology that should not be left behind in catching up with the ever-increasing pace of life. It also allows people to search using sentences in everyday language instead of limiting to a few words. In this way, it catches the speed of our daily routine.

Voice Commerce Statistics

According to researchers, 27% of online users globally use voice search on mobile devices, and it is reported that half of all smartphone users interact with voice search technology every day. Users benefit from the voice search not only through mobile devices but also by using intelligent speakers. From the first quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018, there seems a rapid increase in the innovative speaker markets of the US and China. Users seem to be more willing to use voice assistants over smart speakers every day. Especially in China, the market share of smart speakers was around 5% in the first quarter of 2018, reaching 15% in the second quarter of 2018.

Many eCommerce giants have already brought voice search capability to their applications. So which age ranges use this technology, and how often? Here are the details.

In 2018 35.8 million Millennials, 16.7 million Gen X, 9.9 million Baby Boomers have used a voice-enabled digital assistant. When we look at 2019, this rate has reached 39.3 million for Millennials, 17.2 million for Gen X and 10.1 million for Baby Boomers. Generation Z, born and raised in technology, has the highest usage rate and the fastest increase in voice technology. 55% of teens and 44% of adults use voice search in their daily work.

How about “What activities do people use voice search for the most?” 

According to research, 52.8% of users use voice search while driving, 21.3% while doing any other activity, 7.5% watch while watching TV, and 7.4% while working. Considering these statistics and activities, it is evident that voice search will genuinely be a part of life going forward.

Using Voice Search technology in eCommerce lets users’ shopping experiences be more personalised, and recommendations based on personal preferences can be provided. As a result, voice commerce brings a new level of personal convenience to online shopping. Online shoppers prefer eCommerce platforms that provide this convenience.

As previously mentioned, 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. At the same time, 34%of internet users are interested in purchasing through a voice-controlled intelligent assistant. However, voice commerce comes with security issues, and 70% of voice tech users are concerned about personal security. 

Users still have security concerns about this technology. In online purchases, users do not much prefer this technology. Of course, users are still worried about how this technology can help us with money-related issues without fail, while sometimes it cannot even detect what we are saying. As a result, the rate of purchases via voice is less than other activities. Even though some online shoppers who are still afraid of some security problems do not prefer this technology, most of them are currently using it. This technology, which sometimes makes our work easier and even included in our routines, seems to continue to be included in our lives with an increasing speed and reach many more users.

Voice commerce is predicted to be the top trend for eCommerce in the coming years.