What is the future of online shopping and voice shopping? Privacy dystopia and solution suggestion.
As a professional, who has actively worked in the e-commerce industry for over 10 years in the country with the most on-line stores per capita in Europe, I can continuously monitor development taking place in this sector; therefore, I can indicate certain trends or suggest which trends worth following or reinforcing or, in contrast, which are fruitless.
Over the last five years, online shopping market has changed so much (and accelerated) that even the wildest visions can come true. That is why I outline my vision how shopping would be possible in a few years’ time (I do not consider ten years, but rather only five years).
Personalization, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Big Data, IoT (Internet of Things), voice search/voice shopping and personal assistants such as Google Home, Alexa Echo and many others will be enormously influential.
Which online shops will be affected by changes?
Online shopping sites, focusing on partially and/or completely repeated shopping, or online shops good at motivation of loyal customers to make repeated purchases will undergo the most notable technological revolution. Whether this concerns foodstuff, toners for printers, drugstore items, and other types of fast-moving consumer goods. Opportunities for technological growth are tremendous, with a strong potential to employ these technologies for improved customer experience.
How will voice shopping impact e-commerce?
In the first place, we will need neither notebooks nor smartphones to do repeated purchases (for instance, groceries). We will order the stuff verbally by our voice, just as we used to do in the past. You went to the store and simply told the shop assistant what you wanted to buy.
Voice assistants (Google Home, Alexa etc.), which are already available, and which will lie at the “heart” of our households in a couple of years, will help you — literally using only a few words — to:
- repeat your last purchase as ordered for the last time;
- summarize the last purchase (as a reminder) and delete, for illustration, champagne;
- add extra 4 bottles of Coca-Cola and so on.
Your voice-controlled assistant will recap your purchase order including price, and an online store will deliver selected goods within the time requested. The entire purchasing process will be faster; in addition, completed from your comfortable sofa or while cooking. Voice commands will make use of your hands, smartphones or notebooks entirely useless.
Moreover, creation of a completely new purchase order will be possible. You will dictate items which you will want to buy. For example: milk, orange juice, and bread. Virtual assistant will recognize them, pair them with products available on store, summarize selection of specific brands and their prices; if you want, you will choose between the alternative brands. Finally, you will confirm the purchase order, which the store will deliver to you tomorrow or just in a few hours.
The so-called “shopping list” will be another method, which you can use even today, for instance via “Google Home”, in the same way as you put remainders on the fridge door. With the “Google Home” app, it is far more natural, you can make your own shopping list anywhere; you just tell your smartphone or voice assistant what has just crossed your mind from anywhere in your home. Finally, you can send your shopping list to the online store by a single voice instruction; afterwards, your products will be chosen, price summarized, and purchase dispatched.
Let’s go back to the fridge: a smart fridge, connected to the Internet, will develop another method of grocery list collection (IoT — Internet of Things). Some refrigerators will include cameras which will see inside and monitor quantities. Step by step, your fridge will learn your favourite groceries and whether caviar is a matter of necessity in your kitchen or just New Year’s pleasure. The smart fridge will also be able to suggest missing items and add such items into the cart. Furthermore, I can imagine a fridge which will shop online, let’s say once a week, for those items which, according to its owner, are must-have items. Voice assistant will just ask the owner at the time when the owner is at home (the fact which the voice assistant will easily find out), if the regular purchase order at CZK 450 may be placed; the owner will confirm by the word “YES”.
Fiction? In no case as to the technical level of refrigerating appliances. For instance, the below-mentioned three-years old refrigerator is technically advanced to accomplish such task.
A large display will help you to find an appropriate receipt on the Internet. By one click, you will order all ingredients from the online supermarket.
Maybe you think to yourself — how will my voice assistant choose an appropriate online store or specific products if my shopping list contains 4 bottles of milk, chocolate, and flour? Well, that’s why Big Data are here.
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What is the role of Big Data in e-commerce business?
In the context of this article, Big Data are large data sets, collected by companies such as Google, Facebook as well as web stores, where you do your shopping, web sites and other services your browse. Hundreds of thousands of companies all over the world collect big data; however, not all of them can effectively analyse them. Companies gather such data to gain the best idea possible who are users of their services, how users behave over time (even over years), how their behaviour changes, which parameters influence changes in their behaviour etc. Big Data are interpreted and used in practice for personalization of products, which you can see in the online store or advertisements, which you can see on Facebook. Moreover, to improve customer experience and so on.
The same principles will be applied to specify, in as much detail as possible, selection of specific products, which the online store will offer you when ordering an “orange juice” through your voice assistant. If, in the past, you prioritized a specific brand and ordered such brand regularly (or you ordered more brands, but now you prefer specific one), the shop would know your priority choice (the shop knows it even today); therefore, to your request “I want to order an orange juice” the store is able to reply “Orange juice Granini at CZK 55 has been added to the cart”.
Similarly, the online shop will know your payment methods, save information about your credit card and will know your regular times spent at home, which, of course, the online store will confirm by a short question.
… and then there is the “Big Brother 2.0”
As you perhaps know, you can activate your Google voice assistant by the voice-activation command “OK, Google”. Already today, you can easily find weather forecast, search for practically everything on the Google or ask your voice assistant to read a recipe for your favourite food without smudges on your tablet or keyboard.
However, when you consider technical aspects, you must get the message — that “box” (today, Americans have maybe 10 boxes installed all around their houses) is listening to you all the time. It must. If not, the message “OK, Google” would not be delivered. Then I ask myself — what do they do with all acquired data? Do they process them (as the so-called “Big Data”) for learning and better understanding of voice-activated commands? Isn’t it one step closer to exploitation of such data for marketing purposes?
Google will know what you are talking about at home. Google will know that you are chatting with your friends about holidays; in a couple of minutes, you will see tips on the first minute and/or the last minute holiday packages (depends whether you gossip about your future summer holiday or departure in the next 14 days). Similarly, if you speak about a positive pregnancy test, Google will offer you a pram; or the latest Gillette shaving machine because Google has just heard you to say that you are not satisfied with your existing one.
Does it make your flesh creep?
Is it a great problem or, on the contrary, great potential for e-commerce business?
It is the question of borders of privacy and personal data protection. Fifteen years ago, no one could have imagined what information would be shared with hundreds and thousands of services offered on the Internet. Each year, limits of what we are willing to share are wider and wider. We share photographs, credit card data, information about our homes or families with various social media sites, online shops, and other services. We share fingerprints, private messages, account logins, passwords, and thousands of other information.
The figure below shows what we share intentionally (first layer), what our behaviour on the Internet tells about us (second layer), and what machines think about us on that basis (third layer). Hardly anybody is aware how many terabytes of data we share about ourselves. Today, privacy does not exist anymore — unless you live your life without the Internet. Well, you certainly do not live your life without the Internet because just via the Internet, and most probably because of your interest in the latest technologies, you are just reading this article.
In the future, will voice assistants and online stores use data captured from recordings to make ordering easier, or our life easier? I think so.
Does it make any sense to resist it? I do not think so.
You say to yourself — it is enough not to buy Google Home or another assistant and nobody will tap you? Don’t by be silly. Don’t you have iPhone (and Siri)? Don’t you use Facebook?
How will personal data be utilized?
The solution is quite clear. In my view, the biggest problem we are facing today as regards processing of personal data is that nobody yet has a clear idea which services and companies are processing my personal data. The law says that I can ask (for instance) Google about complete list of all data which Google has on me. One journalist made a request, and received totally 148 GB of data from Google.
However, what I lack is:
- possibility to work with these data and say which specific data I want to share/do not want to share (or to look at things from another perspective — which Google services I want and what corresponding data I must share to receive them). Typically, I would agree with retargeting to personalize shopping, but disagree with storage of photographs more than five years old;
- list of all companies storing now, or in the past, my data.
In particular, the second point is problematic because there is neither centralized nor decentralized (at the level of users — it depends on the point of view) system, providing an overview of these data. If such a system was introduced, it would be up to each one of us whether we would like to receive personalized offers from specific companies. Or to recall our last shopping, unless we would delete such data with one click, restricting the use of our personal data. On the other hand, we would lose many state-of-the-art achievements. However, it would be our decision how to treat our personal data.
Why is the outlined vision of personal data processing the wildest utopian thought contained in this article? Because it fiercely clashes with interests of all companies and services with Google, Facebook and Amazon in the lead — whose all business is based on collection and exploitation of data for advertising purposes.
The only way is a strong, society-wide requirement and pressure exerted on governments of the individual countries. Most likely, dramatic leakage and blatant misuse of personal data (of overwhelming majority of population) would have to occur and/or misuse by another villainous act. If such pressure is strong enough, hypothetically speaking it might happen that individual companies, holding the largest share in the personal data processing market (Facebook, Google, Amazon) might try to use this public requirement to improve their PR and strengthen reputation in a way to become a driving force of such change. Governments would just codify/standardize changes in the method of personal data processing.
These personal data, decentralized under the management of each of us, would be subject to approval/refusal granted to specific company or for its purposes. Each person could control which personal data he/she shares with which company. From one place, clearly, and online.
What will be the role of voice assistants in e-commerce business?
It does not matter if it is an appliance from Google, Amazon, Apple or Samsung. This vision should outline one of many possible applications of voice assistants in the future, namely for the shopping. However, voice assistants can be used to accomplish many more tasks. In the future, they will play a role of the “personal virtual assistant”, i.e., an entity with so much knowledge to make an appointment with hairdresser (based on the regular frequency of visits); remember, which episode of “The Big Bang Theory” sitcom the owner saw for the last time; receiving the instruction “Show the next episode of TBBT” to start exactly the following one. Furthermore, the assistant will play a vitally important role in fast diagnostic of the health problem, thus saving life of its owner.
However, there is a certain technological deficit: what — theoretically — Google Assistant could organize and master today, and what is feasible. This shortage stems from the fact that not all services and online shops are connected with Google environment and many voice assistants are just now being created as start-up projects. Nevertheless, elimination of this shortage is a question of the near future. Support to the Czech language is a barrier in the Czech market; however, this issue should be resolved in the following months. A few weeks ago, Google has started to support Polish language; I do believe that now it is our turn.
Personal data protection and, in general, handling with data will pose a huge challenge.
I am looking forward to the future very much.
What about you?
