New technologies are rapidly changing the way consumers purchase and online businesses do business, making it difficult to keep up with shifting trends.

Voice commerce is the newest frontier in ecommerce payment methods, allowing voice assistant users to make purchases quickly, conveniently, and simply by asking their smart gadgets.

Because this technology is new, many businesses and customers are curious about how it works and how it can improve their purchasing experience. Nonetheless, the use of voice payments is increasing all the time, and shops that adopt it swiftly will reap the benefits.

Voice commerce is an artificial intelligence-based technology that allows you to shop using only your voice and a smart device such as a smartphone or smart speaker. Even before 2022, voice-activated shopping has grown quite popular and well-liked.

As digital customers, we are already familiar with mobile commerce, in which any goods can be purchased in minutes using only our fingertips. However, voice commerce has made online buying easier and more convenient than ever before.

With many e-commerce trends emerging this and prior years, the moment for voice commerce arrived. We’re already familiar to mobile commerce (purchasing via mobile devices, also in the app), and live commerce is often in the spotlight, but voice commerce is about something different.

This trend has grown in popularity since conversational commerce is the most convenient, quick, and simple method of shopping. It requires no skills, knowledge of modern technologies, or even the use of your hands! Because when you utilize voice commerce to buy something, all you have to do is say a command and it’s done.

According to Global Market Insights, global smart speaker sales will exceed $30 billion by 2024. Customers are increasingly choosing this way, but keep in mind that owning a smart speaker is not required to use voice technology in online purchasing. As a result, speech commerce is predicted to become the number one e-commerce trend in the future years.

Voice Search

Voice search, also called voice-enabled, allows the user to use a voice command to search the Internet, a website or an app. Although Voice Commerce is still rather new to us, voice search has been around for quite some time. Various search engines and applications have used it but mostly only for searching using voice. 

Quite a simple thing: at the beginning, you needed to tap a microphone button, speak and look at search results. It was a good idea for those who had trouble writing something, but it still required your action to launch the voice recognition. Then things have moved to voice activated actions like searching, putting on shopping lists, reminding about events etc. 

• Using voice technology to purchase products

Now we’ve gotten even further with the possibility to buy online via voice technology. If you need to search through products or buy several things, you’ll still need to look at the screen and scroll manually… But if you know the product and the store you want to buy in, or just want to re-order, voice commerce is perfect. You can do it in a few seconds without even touching the device. 

The in-between option is also a way to go. It’s still faster to use your voice to search things, then you can just manually pick a product and use voice again to order it conveniently. 

• Voice assistants 

At this point, in addition to reading the voice, systems are also able to recognize and execute commands. No matter if it’s Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, just pick a command to recall the assistant and start buying. 

Read Also: Voice Commerce Market Size

You can choose different languages in settings so that your natural language is well understood. Smart speakers, a phone or other device will recognize your voice and command, search the product and order it for you. Just answer the given questions and everything will be easy.

That’s why if you’re an owner of an e-commerce mobile app, you should definitely let voice assistants in. It will enable more customers to buy in your store and attract new customers to start shopping there. It’s always a good idea to make use of new trends.

• Activating the voice assistant

Using different platforms requires using different voice commands. Here’s how you activate virtual assistants: 

• Apple: “Hey, Siri”
• Google: “OK, Google”
• Amazon: “Hey, Alexa”
• Microsoft: “Hey, Cortana”
• Samsung: “Hi, Bixby”

When it comes to further actions, the voice commands used for e-commerce and other activities are very similar or the same on different platforms. For example: 

• “search for [product] on [website]/in [app]” 
• “re-order [product] from [website]/[app]”
• “show me the new [product] from [brand]”
• “what’s the price of [product]”
• “show me the price of [product] in different stores”

When a consumer makes a purchase query, their voice assistant uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret their command and take them to the most relevant product page. For security reasons, you first need to load and authenticate your stored card before doing the first voice payment.

For example, if someone says, “I want to buy some shoes”, their voice assistant will review their preferences and purchase history, discover that they have previously browsed or bought trainers from a particular website, and take them to that site. The user can then review the list of options available and command their voice assistant to “buy it now”.

Voice commerce clearly has a great deal of potential, but also a few challenges that need to be overcome before its widespread adoption among consumers and financial institutions. That said, Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays and Santander were among the earliest banks to start offering voice recognition payments through Siri, and many others have already, or are set to, follow.

The statistics around use of voice commerce are very encouraging. According to Statista, by 2023, the value of voice-assistant ecommerce transactions is expected to hit nearly $20bn in the US and $19.4bn worldwide – an astonishing increase on the $4.6bn achieved just two years earlier in 2021. If growth continues on this trajectory, voice commerce will surely be a force to be reckoned with in online shopping. 

Other Statista research found that by mid-2022, 27% of US consumers were already making online payments using voice assistants. And data on the share of consumers using voice-activated searches in certain countries found that, of US consumers, 54% used it for retail, 52% for food delivery and restaurants, 49% for consumer packaged goods, and 45% for fashion.