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Jessica Sherer
/(Industry Research)

With adequate time and space to think after last year’s holiday sales push, many ecommerce professionals have settled nicely into a new rhythm for 2023. So, how did the 2022 season of spending actually play out? We’ll share recent online shopping stats from one of our compatible apps, Shopify, plus other industry sources to reflect on what the numbers revealed, what is slated to trend, and how to prepare for the upcoming season.

Glances review of Shopify's ECommerce Trends 2023

Retailers often rely on holiday ecommerce sales to account for a huge chunk of their annual revenue, but during the height of the pandemic, online shopping did not follow the typical patterns. For example, ecommerce revenue and growth rates shot up by 24% in 2020 and by another 18% in 2021.

Ecommerce revenue and growth rates courtesy of shopify.com

Graphic courtesy of Shopify.com, ECommerce Trends 2023

What about 2022, though?

Did holiday ecommerce sales normalize? For the most part, yes, but that doesn’t mean growth was completely stagnant. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

On the growth side of things, according to DemandSage, nearly 649 million people made a purchase from a Shopify store in 2022, up from 572 million in 2021. In addition, Shopify’s revenue increased by 22% to $1.4 billion in the third quarter as compared to the same timeframe in 2021. Stripe reported that more than 350 cities are now home to businesses that collectively process $100 million or more in transactions annually using its platform. For context, in 2017, that number was only 50.

However, other numbers point to a slowdown in 2022. From Thanksgiving Day through Giving Tuesday, Mailchimp customers sent over 8 billion emails, but in 2021, that number was closer to 9 billion. Bloomberg reported in October 2022 that for the past five quarters, online sales growth lagged behind the gains of the retail industry as a whole. In fact, in some categories (e.g., clothing), the percentage of online sales is back to where it was before the pandemic.

“...Growth has now slowed, and 2022 saw the market recover from its breakneck rate of growth.” – ShopifyPlus

Social commerce and other trends to watch

As growth has slowed, some previously under-the-radar sources of sales are now taking center stage. For instance, ShopifyPlus reported that social commerce—the marketplace generated by social media—is permeating every sector of retail. In fact, social networks are now the second most common way consumers find products to purchase. TikTok is the current reigning champ with 20.6% of social media shoppers worldwide using the platform to buy products in January 2022 alone.

Time spent on social media graphic courtesy of Zippia.com

Graphic courtesy of Shopify.com, ECommerce Trends 2023

And while Oren Inditzky, VP of Online Stores for Wix, expects social shopping to “explode” in 2023, it’s not the only ecommerce trend to anticipate for this new year. Shilpa Reddy, VP of QuickBooks Commerce, predicts an increase in ecommerce businesses as people look for ways to offset rising inflation with supplemental income. “This surge in sellers will simultaneously spur an uptick in direct-to-consumer selling,” Reddy wrote.

Scot Gillespie, GM and EVP of Commerce Cloud at Salesforce, anticipates a need for increased agility in retail, “which means it will be crucial to leverage tools that provide flexibility and the ability to pivot swiftly in order to meet new customer expectations,” he said. He believes this means retailers will have to rely more on headless commerce: “the decoupling of the front-end user experience from the back-end ecommerce application.”

Gillespie’s insight points to what didn’t change in 2022 (and won’t change in 2023 either): the need for retail businesses and their employees to efficiently and effectively manage many different ecommerce business apps and systems. Another thing that didn’t change? Glances commitment to helping businesses do just that.

How Glances supports ecommerce teams

As we explained previously, Glances no-code integration platform helps with marketing, sales, and support roles for any online business. More specifically, this includes helping users quickly review and address any customer inquiry from apps like Intercom and Zendesk while staying put in their preferred platform or webpage. Additionally, when a customer is ready to purchase, Glances allows you to seamlessly create invoices in QuickBooks or FreshBooks without navigating away from wherever you are currently working.

Particular to holiday ecommerce for 2023, Glances can help you manage the email marketing overload by connecting with compatible apps like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. You can quickly verify the status of an email campaign even if you are fulfilling a purchase order elsewhere.

Handle ecommerce processes simpler, using Glances!

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More helpful steps

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If you need to connect a specific app or platform with Glances that is not currently available on glances.com, please send your requests to hello@glances.com.

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