Is Voice Search Within Fashion E-commerce the Future? 

E-commerce and The New Kid on The Block 

Since the Amazon and eBay launches of 1995, who could have predicted the growth in online shopping? As technology has improved with an amazing pace, so has the way of targeting customers within online retail. Of course, an essential ingredient for all this has been good SEO. We have all trod the road to discovering the perfect ranking recipes, keeping pace with the clever evolution of the google search algorithms. A move towards sustainable and professional approaches to search optimisation has helped with this, but there is a new kid on the block and her name is Voice Search! With a massive variety of predictions on how this will impact online retail, how seriously should the online fashion sector take this development? 

I have my own theories and fantasies on this, but we will come to that later! After all, the fashion sector is always trying to be both visually engaging and technically astute when it comes to online sales. How will all this fit in with their online game plan and how far ahead will their vision need to be to capitalise on this new developing technology? 

Dealing with Predictions?

As I have said the predictions are varied depending on who you listen to. Let's see some retrospective facts before we look at the two main predictions you usually see pop up in a google search

Some Past Data: 

  • 2018 Google report: 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile.

  • 2018 brightlocal.com report: 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last 12 months and 76% of smart speaker users perform local searches at least weekly—with 53% searching using these devices every day. https://www.brightlocal.com/research/voice-search-for-local-business-study/

  • 2019 Voicebot.AI report: 58% of online adults have used voice search and 33% were using it monthly in early 2019, up from just over 25% in monthly reported use.

Some Predictions: 

“VOICE SHOPPING TO REACH $40 BILLION IN U.S. AND $5 BILLION IN UK BY 2022.” - OC&C CONSULTANTS

  • 2017 ComScore reports prediction: Comscore Senior Director of Emerging Products Susan Engleson examined how consumers are interacting with voice-enabled devices. It was said 'More than half of all smartphone users will be engaging with voice search technology in 2020. Now, this sound bite has been echoed throughout many articles and is just a small snippet lifted from the examination. But nevertheless, we are here, 2020 is in full flow so let's see what this year brings!  

  • A 2018 study from Juniper Research believes that there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 billion at the end of 2018. 

  • A 2018 prnewswire.com prediction was that voice shopping is set to jump to $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion in 2018.

  •  Trawling the internet for stats and predictions we can all see lots to quote, but one thing is for sure it all seems to be heading in one direction. The speed and ingredients may vary, but the new girl on the block looks to be winning the hearts and minds of the big hitters in technology and search, and also the forward-thinking digital marketers.

The Seeds of Voice Search

The foundation of all this 'Voice Recognition' has been around for quite some time. In 1952 Bell Laboratories created the first speech recognition system that could recognise numbers. Moving forward to 1997 and Dragon Dictate launched their dictation to text software on Windows, and so we have had a march to Voice-enabled equipment. But it was not until the smartphone boom and Google releasing a voice recognition app in 2008, did things really start hotting up. IBM’s Watson made a stir in 2010, Apple released Siri in 2011 for the iPhone 4s, Microsoft Cortana followed in 2014 and then came the Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Samsung’s Bixby. Other voice assistants crashing the party include Alice from Yandex, and AliGenie from Alibaba. So, this should be the next big clue for us all; if you have all this investment by such massive companies, you know it's going to go somewhere, the juggernaut has started and I can't see it slowing down. You may need a crystal ball to predict how fast it will be, and what directions it will take, but one thing is for sure, they have all set course and it's only ever going to go one way! Voice technology still has a long way to go, but it has made immense strides already and I feel we will really see big advances over the next five years. 

What Will Fuel Growth? 

Not counting all the speech-enabled phone devices that are out there, we now have devices that are designed solely for voice interaction and search. Alexa devices have sold over 100 million since its general release in 2015 and all other voice devices are gaining massive popularity. But what will fuel the growth of Voice Search and how will it get better? Well, that's all down to AI. It's AI that powers virtual assistants, the two are married together to give you the voice search experience. To propel voice search into the fabric of everyday use by everyone it has to get better, and it will. As the power of computing increases so will their ability to crunch big data. Contextual learning will increase and the AI behind voice technology will leap forward. This is where things become more native, they will flow better, and the voice assistant will be able to understand more complex conversational language. Advancements in AI and Machine Learning will have a huge impact on how we interact with our smart devices and search the internet. Google’s RankBrain is designed to recognise words and phrases to predict outcomes. When it hears a phrase it has never encountered before it makes an educated guess, then tries to match it as best it can. This has the learning process feedback loop that improves the more it is used, giving it the ability to learn and answer unexpected voice searches. The better these voice devices become, the more people will find them easy to use and therefore they will start relying on them for daily activities. This is when the hockey stick effect will kick in, everyone will start using them and all suddenly you will not be able to live without one. 

Fashion Industry VS Traditional Retail

On the services side, Jetson is an early runner in providing businesses with voice commerce services. This service allows businesses to set up a profile with them and upload products. This information is then available to customers using their voice-enabled devices to make purchases.

On the retail side, Walmart made headlines by announcing its partnership with Google to launch the Walmart Voice Order. With the help of Google Assistant, you can now order your shopping via voice. Although this is a move in the right direction, these sort of services are more like shopping list extras you can add to your cart, and I don't think this would translate so well within the highly visual world of fashion. 

Amazon brought the voice search to 'Whole Foods’ and like the Walmart/Google platform, customers can ask Alexa to add items to their grocery list. Also, you can now order most of your shopping off Amazon through Alexa. If you use Alexa in conjunction with your fire stick you can then see all the visuals that you are ordering, definitely a step in the right direction for me. The plus point here for Amazon is that it owns the whole ecosystem, therefore it can create a very slick process. These are just two instances of many trying to figure this space out. For me, the fashion industry needs that visual connection with voice to make it a more powerful experience. 

Within Fashion, H&M launched a shopping guide, Estee Lauder introduced custom-made skincare solutions through voice activation, and British online fashion and cosmetics retailer ASOS is forging forward with Enki. ASOS’ Senior Product Manager Jason Gregory is very bullish about Voice Search, so I feel we will see constant forward momentum from ASOS in the future. With the help of Google Assistant, Enki serves up its users their latest collections via their phones. All you have to do is say "Hey Google, talk to ASOS" and Enki will talk you through the latest products, sending you all the items you like to your smartphone to browse. Now, this is where it is starting to look promising! To me, Voice, AI, big data and exciting visuals have all got to coexist seamlessly! To make this a truly compelling experience it needs to be engaging and frictionless. We are planning a deeper dive into Enki over the next few weeks so stay tuned! 

Some Challenges in E-commerce  

Product Discovery: 

Product discovery seems to be a challenge for most companies. We have talked about how the correct product data is critical, integration with AI and Information Management Systems may be the way forward for this. 

Conversion Rates: 

A big challenge facing fashion retailers right now is how to increase conversion rates. According to Fireclick index findings, conversion rates for fashion and apparel are at 5.9%. Again, better AI would help this situation in many ways. 

High Return Rates:

Return rates for online purchases can be as high as 50% - 80% of first-time customers and can result in them not shopping on the website again. This is where amazing images, exact sizing and precise descriptions come in. This is the big one for me, and I feel this can be alleviated by Voice, AI and Garment Modelling. 

Challenges in Voice Search 

Conversational Phrases:

Earlier I mentioned just one of the challenges, which is for Voice search to understand better conversational phrases. The internet trends report by Mary Meeker’s found that almost 70% of these searches used natural or conversational language. So, we can see the trend is growing which should be the big prompt for us all to optimise for this type of search too. Remember, writing a question in a search engine can be very different from saying it. We have subtle differences in context that need to be addressed at the SEO level (yes, back to SEO again!) It's a good idea to be looking at this now to make sure you are keeping up with voice search optimisation trends. 

Voice to Data Inconsistencies:

Currently the feedback from retail customers on Voice Search is that it lacks accurate product images and there is a difficulty in comparing and researching products with correct information. For these gaps to be plugged that would mean rethinking web systems, data and SEO. AI companies like vue.ai are trying to make sense of this for the fashion industry by fixing these kinds of problems. vue.ai is an end-to-end retail automation platform that is redesigning the future of retail with Artificial Intelligence. Using Image Recognition and Data Science they extract catalogue data and analyse it with user behaviour to improve customer experiences. 

Summary

As I draw to the end of this article, I can’t help but think voice search in fashion E-commerce is an exciting place to be at the moment. It’s all to play for, and the companies that get it right have a lot to gain! There are a lot of AI technology companies working hard at this. I'm guessing Google is the starting point, after all, most of all our searches start there. There is then the ability to then use a bespoke system, leveraging existing AI solutions like Google. Then you have interesting companies like vue.ai that look to have exciting offerings really focusing in on the Fashion industry. One thing is for sure, voice search will become the norm in years to come, so it makes sense to start a look at how you can best position yourself in this sector of search.

If you would like to see our 'How to Optimise Your SEO For Voice' document that will be released on the 19th March 2020? If so then please fill in the information box below and we will email it to you on its release. If you would like to see my ‘A Fantasy Vision of Voice Search in Fashion Retail’ blog, where I run you through what I think we will be able to achieve in the not so distant future, then please follow this link here. 

Thanks for your time! 

Ed Ball

Creative Director`
Prestige Recruitment Group