How Voice Search and Mobile Commerce Can Enhance the Magento Shopping Experience

The business world has always been known for evolving to meet changing customer needs and expectations. But this evolution has significantly progressed with the latest technological advancements transforming shopping experiences altogether. 

This has paved the way for many of the latest advances to find their place in today’s market, and voice search and mobile commerce are among these developments. Mobile eCommerce has become a significant cornerstone as more businesses go online and people shop from their mobile devices. 

mCommerce on the Rise!

Numbers suggest the mCommerce market sales will likely hit $534.18 billion, accounting for 40.4% of eCommerce sales. These stats highlight the significance of mCommerce today. Modern shopping experiences are all about convenience, and what better way to offer convenient shopping experiences than using voice search to your advantage? 

This technology requires customers to search for products and services using their voice as a command. Both these technologies play a crucial role in delivering superior experiences, and yet many are unaware of the nuances associated with them. 

This blog takes a comprehensive look into voice search and mobile commerce to give you a better insight into the experience. Continue reading to understand more about mobile shopping and voice search.

Understanding Voice Search 

Today’s digitized business environment deals with extensive competition, and voice search can help you stand out. Also known as a voice-enabled search, a voice search helps people request information using verbal words instead of typing the query into a search box. 

This relatively new approach has gained unmatched popularity thanks to its ability to streamline and simplify search. Voice search is known for being highly efficient as it reduces exertion by replacing queries you enter using keyboards. 

What Adds To The Improved Voice Search?

Voice search is the new way of adding depth to your shopping experience. It helps you improve two significant aspects of search, namely: 

• Reduced spelling errors and typos while providing the most relevant results based on their queries. 
• Allows businesses with more convenience, further helping them enhance user experience and drive better results.          

There is no denying that humans and even most animals use voice to communicate with each other. This alone makes voice search a very compelling alternative for businesses looking to stand out and win over customers. 

The smart speaker market with devices responding to verbal commands will likely exceed the valuation mark of $30 billion by 2024. The future of voice search becomes even more promising when you see the rising popularity of voice-enabled tools such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. 

These tools have played a crucial role in highlighting the potential of voice search, a must-have technological tool for all.         

The Significance of Mobile Commerce

Gone are the days when prominent big tech companies had their sole monopoly over mobile applications for shopping. Things have changed, and almost every business can now leverage the potential of eCommerce mobile to reach a broader customer base. 

The role of mCommerce Is Evolving

This is a crucial tool for helping companies to facilitate healthy competition with equitable opportunities for all. But apart from accessing a wiser customer base, there are many other reasons businesses need to leverage the potential of mobile commerce. 

For instance, mobile commerce can help businesses accelerate their buying journey as mobile apps are 1.5x faster in loading data and providing relevant results. Besides, mobile commerce can effectively reach the right customer at the right time and facilitate better conversions.    

mCommerce = Access To Market Insights!

The modern business world is filled with novel opportunities that businesses can capitalize on, and mobile commerce can help you realize that goal. You can use mobile commerce to access valuable customer and market data to generate valuable insights. 

You can then use these insights to make better decisions, understand your customers, and facilitate effective marketing while identifying new opportunities to drive business growth.     

Magento: A Leading eCommerce Platform

Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms that businesses from all over the globe use to establish an effective and performant eCommerce platform. 

Here’s how Magento is on its way to becoming the #1 eCommerce platform: 

Access To Several Customization Options

The open-source platform allows people to incorporate all sorts of customizations based on their business requirements. This further helps them deliver a superior user experience and drive better customer retention with engaging shopping experiences.   

Access To Multiple Tools

You can use Magento to access several tools and features to facilitate effective eCommerce operations. This includes everything from catalog management tools to search engine optimization and marketing tools. Magento development services are well-suited for almost all sorts of businesses regardless of their operational scale or industry.

Unmatched Scalability For Business

The platform has all the features you need to sustain your business’s growth as you drive better sales with time. It is not uncommon for eCommerce businesses to have to change platforms to meet the evolving requirements of the business. However, this is not the case with Magento, as it offers unmatched scalability features to help you scale your offerings as you grow. 

This means seamless access to many themes and plugins, enabling you to give your website the most preferable looks and appeal. A reliable Magento development company can help you deliver superior customer experiences and establish better long-term relationships to foster customer loyalty.     

Benefits of Implementing Voice Search in Magento

The competition in the eCommerce sector is increasing by the day, mainly due to low entry barriers providing equitable opportunities to many. This makes it very important to ensure businesses go out of their way to stand out in the crowd. 

Here’s how Magento voice search will amplify your business: 

Improved Shopping Experience

Voice search in Magento is one of the most effective ways to enhance customer’s shopping experience and stand out with your offerings. It can be great in terms of helping customers facilitate successful searches more efficiently and easily. 

You can also leverage voice search in Magento to deliver personalized shopping experiences, delivering recommendations based on customer data. 

Seamless User Experience

Voice search in Magento also helps businesses offer a seamless user experience to boost customer loyalty by providing them with the best shopping experiences. It is a great way to make your business’s offerings more accessible to your customers. 

This also helps customers get a more convenient shopping and searching experience since they need not use the keyboard anymore. 

All a customer has to do is enquire about a specific product or service the business offers. This will automatically open an exhaustive list of your business’s relevant products and services. Customers can then easily choose the product of their choice and go on to purchase it without anything hampering their shopping experience.  

Simplifies Your Operations

Integrating voice search in Magento stores is a relatively simple process where you only need to follow a couple of simple steps to get the job done. 

Step 1: Search Your Default XML File

You must start by adding the default.xml file in the app\ code\ Vendor\ Extension\ view\ frontend\ layout path. 

Step 2: Add the Necessary Codes

You will then need to add the necessary codes and move on to the next step for adding voice.phtml. Here, you must add voice.phtml in the app\ code\Vendor\ Extension\ view\ frontend\ templates\ voice.phtml and add the necessary codes.  

Step 3: Add Relevant Voice Data

The third step requires you to voice-search.js app\ code\Vendor\ Extension\ view\ frontend\ web\, js\ voice-search.js path. 

Step 4: Add the Necessary Codes

In the final step, you must add Data.php in app\ code\Vendor\ Extension\ Helper\ Data.php path and add all necessary codes. 

Following these steps is all you need to integrate voice search in your Magento eCommerce store. But before you integrate voice search in your Magento store, you must optimize it for voice search. This will require you to incorporate the right long-tail keywords, structure the website, and optimize its speed.        

Challenges and Considerations for Voice Search in Magento

No good thing comes without a challenge; voice search in Magento is no exception. It is important to clearly understand these challenges and remain mindful of them while incorporating voice search in Magento. 

One of the most notable challenges comes here in terms of the accuracy of search results. Problems with the accuracy of voice search results in Magento are more common than you might imagine. 

This does not come as a surprise, considering people have different accents, and training AI models to recognize all words in all accents is anything but easy. 

Compatibility Is A Concern!

Compatibility is another concern for using voice search in Magento eCommerce, as voice search is yet to be available across all devices. Another significant challenge of using voice search in Magento concerns user privacy. 

Voice recognition AI models need data to enhance their operability, but people are not always comfortable sharing their data with third parties. Numbers suggest that 79% of internet users share concerns related to privacy when using voice search features. This number highlights the importance of resolving privacy-related concerns when integrating voice search in Magento stores.           

As is the case with any other aspect of your business, challenges related to integrating voice search in Magento can be solved. For instance, increasing voice recognition databases is a great way to resolve this issue. 

Device Compatibility

Besides, making more devices compatible with voice search abilities is a great way to address challenges related to compatibility. Lastly, taking stringent measures to ensure nothing compromises users’ privacy is the only effective way to resolve privacy-related issues. 

This shows that solving voice search-related challenges in Magento should not be very difficult as long as you take a well-thought-out approach.      

Mobile Commerce Optimization in Magento

Even though Magento is one of the most performant eCommerce platforms, you will still need to optimize it for mobile commerce. This is a highly effective way to deliver superior user experiences and generate better sales. 

Fortunately, Magento is superb in terms of helping you facilitate effective mobile commerce optimization and drive better results with minimal effort.  

Here are some tips to help you optimize your Magento mobile experience: 

• Responsive Design

You will need to ensure your Magento eCommerce store has a responsive design. This should not be a challenge, considering Magento offers many responsive themes based on the latest market standards. These designs offer robust and consistent user experiences across different OS platforms, devices, and browsers.  

• Leverage Mobile-friendly Themes

Most mobile devices come with certain space limitations, making creating a mobile navigable design challenging. This makes it important to leverage the mobile-friendly themes Magento offers that help one access features with minimal clicks. 

You must aim to provide users with what they need without going through complex procedures. This will be very important in helping you enhance user experiences and boost customer loyalty.  

• Store’s Performance

The final and one of the most important considerations you need to remember here is the performance of your Magento eCommerce store. This means optimizing every element of the website, starting from loading speed to image quality and other relevant aspects. 

This is one of the most important aspects for consideration here since ineffective performance can contribute to negative user experiences and further hamper your business’s reputation.   

Voice Search vs. Traditional Mobile Commerce

Voice search has revolutionized eCommerce significantly, and this change becomes even more apparent when you evaluate the difference between voice search and traditional mobile commerce. 

For instance, with the growing popularity of voice search in mobile commerce, long-tail keywords have increased significantly. This is not surprising, considering search queries are much longer with voice search compared to traditional mobile commerce. 

Local Listing Vs. Searches

Then there’s the difference in local listing searches, where voice queries are more dominant than traditional searches. People use voice searches to find places near them, making it an ideal choice for local listings. 

For instance, people use voice searches to raise queries such as the “nearest restaurant near me” or “places to visit” and more. Another significant difference between voice and traditional searches is voice search offers more concise and crisp results. 

This works great since people using their voices for searches are mostly hurrying to access the relevant information.     

Voice Search Adds To Advantages!

Given these observations, it is no surprise that leveraging voice search can give you access to ample advantages. Some of these best-known advantages include making searches more efficient and easy, delivering better personalization, and amplifying traffic generation. However, certain challenges with voice search include lack of accuracy, privacy issues, and compatibility.     

On the other hand, there’s traditional mobile commerce, which does offer many advantages compared to voice search. For instance, traditional searches offer a great deal of accuracy, better compatibility with most devices, and lower concerns related to privacy. But there are also certain disadvantages of traditional mobile experiences, such as lack of personalization, lack of efficiency, and limited traffic generation abilities.    

All this detailed evaluation raises the question about using the right approach towards search based on your business’s needs. The business world is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and voice search is a great way to keep up with this competition. This is also the reason why the number of voice assistant units is expected to rise to 8 billion units in recent times. 

However, that does not mean you should abandon conventional searches altogether! Instead, you must leverage a combination of both approaches to ensure you access both the benefits and disadvantages of both tactics.  

Practical Tips for Enhancing the Magento Shopping Experience

Offering customers superior shopping experiences is no longer a choice for businesses striving to survive in this competitive business environment. But this is not much of a concern considering there are many effective ways Magento store owners can deliver superior shopping experiences. 

Here are a few practical tips to enhance your shopping experience with Magento:

1. Minimize the Steps Involved: 

For starters, minimizing the steps involved in completing a transaction is a great way to deliver better shopping experiences. Besides, you must also focus on essential technical elements such as the page load time. The faster your page loads, the better the chances of conversions and minimizing bounce rates. 

2. Add Visually Appealing Experiences:

Using engaging and visually appealing Magento themes is another tried and tested way Magento store owners can leverage to deliver better shopping experiences. Magento store owners must also take many measures to optimize their stores for voice search and mobile commerce. 

3. Implement Proper Keywords:

You can start with a proper keyword search based on the queries people search the most and are relevant to your brand. Using natural language and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is another great way to drive better results with your Magento eCommerce store.   

4. Test Your End Product:

The last thing you need to remember here is testing. Testing is one of the most effective ways to determine flaws within your websites and take measures to address them. You must test every aspect of the website to ensure everything works well. 

If you encounter any discrepancies, it is highly recommended you take all appropriate measures to address and correct them effectively. This will ensure your website is without discrepancies, offering customers an unmatched experience and driving better loyalty.  

In Conclusion

Voice search and mobile commerce are two of the dominant technologies transforming the online business world. Businesses must leverage the potential of these technologies to enhance their reach and deliver superior customer experiences. 

These technologies are great in terms of helping you get a better sense of the market and customers and augment your offerings accordingly.  This is where eCommerce platforms like Magento come into the picture to help you make the most of these advanced technologies. 

The platform is equipped with a plethora of features and functionalities to help you create the ideal eCommerce store. The best part is that you need not spend extravagant resources to get results with Magento. 

Businesses must better understand what mobile commerce and voice search are to use them to their full potential, so make sure you are mindful of this information and use these insights to deliver better experiences to customers. This will help you stand out in the crowd and drive better results with minimal effort. 

Read more: The Power Of Personalization Customizing For Your Multi-Vendor eCommerce Marketplace

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