I returned home from my semester abroad after 4 months away to find my parents had reached a new level of laziness in my absence.
“Hey Alexa, turn on the fishtanks” said mum and I watched our fish tank lights turn on. (apparently turning on a switch is just TOO much effort… saves them asking me to do it though! 🙂 )
Voice activated home assistants are becoming increasingly popular in recent years with Google Home and Alexa Echo leading the way in this space. This article published in December 2018 reports that 1.35 million Australians have a voice assistant in their home which is a 200% increase in just four months. Even more fascinating is that 16% of people are predicted to use their voice assistant for shopping, providing an opportunity for brands to capitalise on this growing market.
This also gives brands a strong reason to consider the pronunciation and audio features of a brand as these will become just as important as the logo and other visuals associated with the brand. Retail industries such as groceries, apparel and technology should be planning for the upcoming growth in e-commerce within their industries.
Here’s a video showing how voice shopping works for the Amazon Echo.
Monitoring the users previous purchase history and suggesting new deals are among the many features that voice assistants can do in relation to shopping, providing a convenient method of replenishing products.
Low involvement products seem to be most ordered products via voice assistant as this article reported the top 4 products ordered were dog food, soup, hand soap and coffee. This leads me to wonder whether high involvement products would be purchased using only the voice assistance since in many cases you won’t be able to see the product.
What are your thoughts on using your voice only to shop? Do you think you will ever be a voice only shopper? Let me know in the comments below!
Talking Tech with Bec 
Interesting stuff! I think it’s definitely a possibility the more popular and advanced it becomes the more likely I think I am to jump aboard the voice only shopper train. As for now I like to see the product before I buy!
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Thanks for your comment Natasha. Many shoppers are just like you in the sense that they would prefer to see the product before they buy it – even if that does mean only on a screen. But I think that this issue is something that online retailers should consider in order to not deter purchasers from using the voice only shopping; perhaps free returns or something similar to incentivise the order.
To give you an example, I just purchased a mattress online – and yes although I could see the mattress when I was purchasing it on the screen I was not able to try the mattress in store as the retailer only offers an online store. This particular retailer offers free returns within 100 nights if you aren’t happy with the mattress so you don’t really have anything to lose by purchasing. If all retailers offer a similar returns scheme, they may incentivise purchases to trial the product!
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What may some of the other implications for digital marketers be? How does the growth of voice assistances impact on SEO strategies, for example?
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Thanks for your comment Kristel! It’s really important for digital marketers to ensure that their products are organically being found early on in the search results! This is because if I ask Alexa to purchase me toilet paper, it’s likely to go to the top results to purchase the toilet paper for me which means the results lower down are being ignored. I have even noticed this if I ask Alexa any question which requires a google search, the result she reads aloud to me is always the first result on a Google search. So essentially with the growth of voice assistances, digital marketers should consider their SEO strategies to attempt to bring their website to the top of the list, organically, or risk being ignored.
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I’d say I’ve been quite aware of voice assistants but I never knew how popular they are becoming!
I haven’t really looked into using voice assistants myself but I think it would be a great help in the future when I’d need to start purchasing household items myself. I don’t think I could fully convert to buying solely from voice assistants as like you mentioned, you can’t always view the products. Do you think it’ll be long until your digital assistant can also start showing you what you’re buying?
Overall, interesting post Bec!
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Hi Kath! It will definitely take a little bit of time before a lot of people will even consider using voice assistants to shop! It’s worth noting that some devices to actually have a screen and therefore you will be able to see the product on the screen before you commit to purchasing the product. But nevertheless, undoubtedly a lot of people prefer to shop around rather and assess their options (in particular for high involvement products)!
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