Ecommerce Digital Agency: Trends One Must Try Out

To lead or to follow a trend is a dilemma that affects not just a typical ecommerce agency in London but global business as a whole. The UK is fighting to claw itself back into some form of prosperity, and ecommerce development in London is a key lever of success, but following trends could either be extremely fruitful or a total waste of time and money – the trouble is, who knows until it’s too late?

Social networks and other trends

Rich, powerful, clever people in banking and media spent fortunes buying up mushrooms in the mid 2000s. These mushrooms looked to be growing incredibly fast and the powerful people in the media wanted to catch the wave (apologies for two metaphors in one sentence!). But, as every surfer in Hawaii knows, some waves look incredibly promising but when the moment comes to surf, the wave seems to die under their feet. The mushrooms in the mid 2000s are typically exemplified by Myspace, which was created in 2003 and bought for about $580M in 2005 by News Corporation. Unfortunately for Rupert Murdoch, Facebook was born in 2004 and by 2009 had overtaken Myspace, which was eventually sold to in June 2011 for a paltry $35M.

Web design in London would never recommend leading or following a trend because it is impossible to know what will or what will not take off. It has to be a gut feeling based on instinct rather than any kind of commercial nous or experience. Even Facebook, which is supposed to have a value of $100Bn, only makes an annual profit of a few hundred million dollars but its value is based on its numbers of users. In normal business, the value of Facebook would be about $5Bn but the fear of losing out on a massive trend is driving up its value, despite the lesson of Myspace.

If you are looking for an ecommerce agency in London to advise on the latest whims and trends that circulate the internet like the wind, the advice should be to simply trust your own instincts. In other words, if it looks nonsensical then it probably is; your smart digital agency in London can advise on the best way to spend your marketing budget and inform you as to which way the wind is currently blowing but investment online should always be in little bites and never a case of spending all your marketing budget backing one particular trend.

Twitter is a forum that is getting loads of publicity at the moment and trends on twitter often make the national news. But the twitterati are simply reeds in water, swaying back and forth; it could provide great publicity or simply a water cooler moment that is quickly forgotten.

Currently, Facebook is in the news for forcing all its users to use its new Timeline option – as far as Facebook is concerned, its users can either accept the change or leave; ironically, that is what is happening albeit in very small numbers but, who knows – there may be another Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard who may turn Facebook into another Myspace and then trending on Facebook will mean as much as trending on Friends Reunited.

The title of this article states that there are trends you must try out but by the time you read this, any recommended trends may well have been superseded by another trend. As every ecommerce agency in London knows, the only organisation with serious online power to set trends is Google. If Google sees a trend that it doesn’t like it blocks it, but mostly, if there is money to be made, Google is happy for almost any trend to gather traction.

If you are a business organisation looking to profit from trends in 2012, the one area of business that really can help drive visitors to your website, whether it is via social networks such as Facebook, or via a plethora of other routes, is top quality SEO. Your ecommerce development in London should not be about following trends, but about making sure that your website and all your online marketing via blogs and articles and sponsored links are fully search engine optimised with properly analysed key words and phrases. Analysis of your SEO is a far more important than following trends.