As of 2020, 82.9% of U.S adults own a smartphone, 56.4% use a voice assistant, and 34.7% possess a smart speaker (Voicebot). The rise of voice assistant popularity has led to new industry innovations as businesses strive to offer the best possible experience for their customers. One of these innovations is the ability to shop with your voice. John Franklin, an Associate Partner at OC&C, says, “Voice commerce represents the next major disruption in the retail industry. Just as e-commerce and mobile commerce changed the retail landscape, shopping through smart speakers promises to do the same”.
How does voice shopping work?
Users can save their payment information to their devices or accounts. Once the payment is saved, they can launch their assistant to look up an item, reorder a previous purchase, find pricing at a local business, or anything else they need. Before purchase, the assistant will confirm the product with the user; if they say no, the assistant will continue to offer different options until they say yes. After an order is placed, customers can track the shipping progress by asking their voice assistant until their purchase arrives.
Are consumers shopping with their voice assistants?
How to Optimize Your Business for Voice Commerce
- Craft high performing product descriptions
- The highest percentage of customers using voice assistants are researching products and adding items to their shopping lists (Voicebot). To improve your voice shopping conversion rate, it’s best practice to create product descriptions that can be read aloud to the listening customer. ABTasty recommends answering all the important questions about the product within the description to help the customer decide quickly.
- Simplify the shopping process
- Make your items easy to find by tagging and categorizing all products on your website. The easier you make it to find the item they need through voice, the better your sales will be.
- Launch skills for major voice assistants
- A skill is like an app for a voice assistant and can also be referred to as an intent or action depending on the platform you are using. Skills make it possible for users to purchase directly from you through their voice assistant without having to visit your website first. We recommend developing skills for some of the major platforms, including Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Apple Siri.
- Schema markup
- Schema markup is a code that identifies sections of a website or article to speak to a user. Voice assistants use this information to answer questions and make recommendations. For more information on how to set up schema markup for your website, click here!
- Bonus: Schema markup also helps search engines understand your website’s content more, which can help boost SEO.
Have any other tips? Share them down below!
Sources: voicebot.ai, occstrategy.com, marketingdive.com, brightlocal.com, abtasty.com, developer.amazon.com, developers.google.com, docs.microsoft.com, developer.apple.com
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