Voice technology is growing continuously and has a significant impact on commerce. It is changing the shopping behaviors of people. Voice assistants provide a huge opportunity to connect with their customers. In case of voice technology, people use smart speakers to find products online, shop and purchase online. Hence voice commerce are not just limited to finding the product but also ordering and buying it. Completing a purchase becomes faster and can be accomplished at any time of a day with the help of voice commerce.

Now let’s see how virtual assistants are used for online voice shopping:

In case if a customer use Alexa for shopping online on Amazon, it checks the shopper’s buying history and suggests products based on the past data. If there is no previous request in the stored data, Alexa then suggests ‘Amazon Choice’ products. Alexa next announces the product price and asks whether the shopper wants to buy it or not. If the shopper wishes to buy then Alexa places the order or else it suggests other options. Companies gather customer data to provide more personalized services using virtual assistants. Virtual assistants constantly analyze and learn a customer’s shopping patterns and re-ordering of products can be done instantly. They will eliminate the need to log in and will allow companies to gather information like customer preferences and their trend information.

Below listed are few key factors to consider when interacting with customers via voice assistants:

• Language limitations: One of the main challenge across voice assistants is language difficulty. To keep people interested in voice devices, developers have to think new designs to ensure that everything goes naturally like humans interaction. More focus should be made to natural language processing (NLP). It depends on how accurate voice assistants understand and respond to request. Higher the response higher the people make use of such devices.

• Gaining customers trust: Trust should be built between the user and the device to increase purchasing through voice assistants. Lack of trust results in customers purchasing only those products to which they are familiar with. This also affects when people want to discover new products and they usually switch to traditional online shopping via web or mobile. Companies have to focus on improving personalized recommendations and make people trust them which they get from virtual assistants.

• Give customers an awesome experience: Retailers must make it easy for buyers to purchase. It is necessary to make sure that people know the correct usage of brand names and products. If people are educated enough then the interaction can be made without any efforts. Don’t make your customers to come to you instead you go to your customers.

Voice commerce is gaining huge momentum in ecommerce. Virtual assistants that were used to find products online using voice search are already making shopping easier for its customers. Voice search is making huge impact on ecommerce and developers should focus on it when building their strategies. Voice commerce still have a long way to travel.