Since the Covid-19 outburst, technological advancements and emerging innovations have digitized the online marketplace globally. Due to the pandemic restrictions, eCommerce sales increased as people began to shop for essentials, groceries, food, and other services for the first time. Thus, the online retailing market is growing at a fast pace and is expected to touch worldwide sales of $6,542 billion by 2023.
Undoubtedly, the industry has come a long way, but the journey was not easy. Ecommerce has gone through various challenges, like identity fraud, regulatory sanctions, and much more. In addition to this, the ever-growing competition and keeping up with evolving customer needs has also impacted this sector. However, continued efforts are being made by businesses, Fintech, and law enforcement authorities to make the digital landscape secure.
This blog will discuss the effective role of identity verification systems in the online marketplace, along with the 2022 expectations and global regulatory framework.
COVID-19 and Online Marketplace: 2022 Expectations
Whenever the new year approaches, market and business experts come up with several expectations regarding the industry’s trends and new innovations. However, the one sector that is all set to touch new skies and consistent growth patterns is the online marketplaces. So, here are some predictions for the digital market industry;
#1 Social Commerce
There has been a significant increase in the usage of social media as smartphones have taken over the world in no time. Due to this, a great opportunity for online retailers has opened. As millions and billions of people are present on different social media platforms it makes it easy for businesses to market their products and services. This will pave the gates for international buyers, resulting in an increase in sales. Despite the facts, the power of social media as an online marketplace can not be neglected. It’s expected that in 2022, it will be important for the e-market to test and learn from social media sites. However, brands and online retailers will swiftly direct towards such platforms to serve flooding customers over the internet.
#2 Technology to Become Even More Prevalent
Artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and other emerging technologies have already revolutionized the idea of the online marketplace and the use of tech-driven tools will become more common this year. Undoubtedly, the businesses that understood the potential of AI and adopted it have been able to provide personalized service, just according to their clients’ requirements. AI made the conventional means of marketing products into a whole new experience by visualizing products. Similarly, AI-based chatbots and recommendation systems are also becoming common to provide customers with a seamless experience. However, in this year, the AI role to transform the online marketplace will become more significant, through complex algorithms businesses will be able to analyze the market as well as customers’ needs. This will allow them to come up with products and services as their customers are in search of.
#3 Brands expanding through D2C
The concept of direct to consumer (D2C) is all set to assist businesses in achieving their goals and objectives in 2022. Many online retailers and brands that initiated their services on Amazon fostering their D2C channels will build up their separate brands. Billions of dollars have been invested into Amazon each year by businesses that carry no brand equity on the channel. Thus, the owners of such online brands will create their own D2C channels and social presence to attract mass audiences other than Amazon.
#4 Live Stream Shopping
The business experts expect that this year businesses will see a significant spike in global live-streaming shopping. This will be a great opportunity for the online marketplace industry as Tiktok, Facebook and Amazon are considering making live streams their mainstreams. Live stream shopping will provide businesses to provide their services to customers around the globe. According to Statista, there were around 80 million social buyers in the US in 2020 that was 30% more than in 2019. Since then, the awareness and user acceptance have increased, hence the number of online buyers also skyrocketed.
#5 More Tools for Brands
The channel manager and director of eBay, this year’s platform will come up with more tools for brands to market themself in a more professional manner through self-service promotional tools. After Amazon, eBay has become a trustworthy online marketplace, by providing customers robust services. However, keeping in mind social distancing norms, the new acronym “Q-commerce” will also become mainstream, through which the business will deliver the orders and goods within hours and minutes, not days. In addition to this complete new tech-driven fulfillment options will also emerge, that will aid online retailers to achieve speedy and frictionless deliveries.
European Regulation for Online Marketplace
EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2)
The European Union Directive, PSD2 is legislated to set requirements and standards for the businesses that provide payment services, and will significantly affect financial institutions, e-money exchanges, and online marketplaces. PSD2 aims to enhance customer data protection, making online payments secure and lower down the cost of payments. In addition to this, more services will be brought within the FCA’s scope PSD2. This includes account aggregation services that aim to help businesses to manage their finances, allow customers to make online payments in different ways without using a credit card. The other major development in PSD2 is new security standards known as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). This involves the use of 2FA( two-factor authentication) for banks and the online payment industry.
Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations
EU Electronic Commerce Directive 2002, implements the European Union Electronic Commerce Directive into UK’s law. This directive was legislated to streamline the rules of online marketplaces across the EU Member states with the aim of enhancing customer experience. The regulation refers to “information society services”. This means “any service normally provided for remuneration at a distance, by means of electronic equipment for the processing (including digital compression) and storage of data, at the individual request of a recipient of the service. The requirement for an information society service to be ‘normally provided for remuneration’ does not restrict its scope to services giving rise to buying and selling online. It also covers services (insofar as they represent an economic activity) that are not directly remunerated by those who receive them, such as those offering online information or commercial communications (e.g. adverts) or providing tools allowing for search, access and retrieval of data”.
How Shufti Pro Helps
Shufti Pro’s robust identity verification solution is an ideal option for the online marketplace and e-commerce businesses as it allows them to determine the true identities of their customers and can verify their transactions before getting them on board or making payment. AI-powered ID verification systems along with AML screening make the perfect combo to make customers risk assessments and categorize clients according to the threat level. Generating results with 98.67 accuracy in less than a second, Shufti Pro is crucial for your business.
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