Voice shopping is the latest trend shaping the future of mobile commerce. It’s impossible to think of voice and mobile shopping as separate entities — these two experiences are forever intertwined. Customers now expect the convenience and speed of asking Alexa to complete a purchase in every mobile shopping interaction. Retailers should rise to the occasion to meet these expectations.

Big tech companies are leading the voice shopping conversation

Optimism for the voice shopping market leans heavily on the future: Juniper forecasts that this market will skyrocket to $80 billion in 2023.  Voice shopping increased with 66.4 million U.S.-based smart speaker owners in 2018. That means 26.2% of all U.S. adults has access to a smart speaker.

The usual tech suspects have already cashed in on the voice shopping boom. Users can interact with voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana to purchase almost anything via a smartphone or a voice-activated smart speaker. These artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants are shaping not just the devices and interfaces we use, but also influencing entire retail marketing and advertising strategies.  

Voice shopping is here to stay. Retail leaders can capitalize on the hot new trends in voice shopping, but they must also put the work into understanding the challenges and limitations of using voice to drive commerce. 

So what are most common challenges involved with voice shopping’s

Like with any hot technology, the early adoption stage is both the most exciting and tenuous time to get on board. It’s important to retain optimism for voice shopping’s meteoric rise, but temper those giddy feelings with a bit of reality. The hard truth about voice search technology is that it’s flawed. Smart retail leaders can find success with voice shopping if they go into their ventures with eyes wide open.Here are a few of the biggest limitations and challenges with voice search and voice shopping.

Speech recognition isn’t perfect 

Today’s voice shoppers demand a broad range of options yet struggle with technology’s limitations, such as kinks within the AI interface. A research study performed by Forrester asked Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana 180 questions about products and services and ranked each response as either passing or failing. Overall, the voice assistants failed 65% of the questions. This failure rate may frustrate customers and make it less likely that they will engage with voice-activated devices.

Additional hardware is a hard sell for users

Consumers are also limited by manufacturers’ requirements for hardware and the associated costs. In some cases, consumers may need to spend more to get full access to voice shopping capabilities. To use Amazon’s Alexa voice search and shopping service, consumers must be Amazon customers and have a device enabled with Alexa. This means they need to use the Amazon app on their cell phone or purchase additional hardware such as a Fire tablet or an Echo Dot. Moreover, Alexa users cannot access complete functionality for Alexa voice shopping unless they are members of Amazon Prime. The ask to purchase additional hardware to take advantage of voice shopping convenience might be too much for some consumers.

Users are slow to adopt

Another challenge in the voice shopping market is that most consumers haven’t tried it. Keep in mind that this segment is still very small. At the end of 2018, eMarketer projected that voice shopping commerce in 2018 will reach $2.10 billion — just 0.4% of U.S. ecommerce sales. Lackluster shopping experiences with virtual assistants that fail to understand commands and requirements to purchase additional hardware may be influencing potential voice shopping users to avoid trying the new technology, leading to the lower than expected adoption numbers.

Retail leaders can create effective marketing and customer experience strategies when they have all the information. Voice search still has a long way to go in many aspects, but the rewards outweigh the risks. Just make sure you’re aware of the risks and how to plan around them.

Fraud is an issue in voice shopping

Voice technology’s fast rise has captured the attention of consumers, advertisers and retailers alike — as well as fraudsters. The voice channel is unfortunately ripe for fraud and other security vulnerabilities, mostly because the platforms, interfaces and devices are still so new.

Retailers and consumers must navigate a minefield of potential fraud when using voice search and shopping services. From privacy breaches like Amazon sending a German Alexa user’s recordings to the wrong user to concerted fraud efforts like deep fake audio scams, the potential for fraudulent activity in voice tech grows alongside optimistic economic projections. 

This might give some insight into why consumers still prefer traditional shopping experiences over newer technologies like voice shopping. 

The future of voice shopping is happening now

We’re still in the growth stage of the voice shopping market. It’s challenging to predict exactly when platform- and device-agnostic voice searches will be standard on smart speakers, and when smart speakers will become an essential item for the home or office.

Retailers should expect that their customers will begin demanding more (and better!) voice shopping experiences over the next few years as voice search technology continues to grow.

There are a few fundamental reasons why voice shopping has huge potential. If we can understand these reasons, we can shape a strategy that matches or exceeds customer expectations, as more and more consumers use voice assistants to buy goods and services:

It’s faster. We can speak faster than we can type, so using voice is typically quicker than any other modality. For example, in 2018, Virgin Trains in the UK launched an Alexa skill that lets customers book train tickets through Alexa. It takes the average booking time down from 7 minutes online to 2 minutes via voice. The potential to save time is always something that appeals to customers.

It’s frictionless. No matter how user-friendly you make your website or app, no matter how much you work on your conversion rate, you’re always battling the inherent friction that’s built into the device itself. Consider that, in order to get to your fantastically optimized app, a user has to:

1. Pull out their phone

2. Unlock it

3. Swipe to find your app

4. Tap to open it

5. Wait for it to load

Only then can they begin that delightful experience you’ve prepared for them. With voice, everything is just an utterance away. There are simply fewer barriers to overcome in order to start the shopping experience.

It can convert leads to sales. It’s not just access and speed that are driving the growth of voice shopping. Above all else, voice converts leads into actual sales. Consider the example of Invoked Apps’ suite of Alexa skills, which allow users to play ambient sounds, such as white noise, city soundscapes, thunderstorms, and much more. They’re some of the most popular Alexa Skills in the Skills Store, attracting more than 150,000 users per day. Founder Nick Schwab told me that when Amazon released In-Skill Purchases (ISPs) for Alexa in 2018, giving developers the ability to sell digital goods through their Alexa Skills, Schwab rolled out ISPs in his own skills. This gave users the ability to pay for premium features — i.e. to play two different ambient sounds at the same time — a city soundscape with an open fire, for example.

When asked about the conversion rate of users upgrading to paid sounds, Schwab said, “Overall I’m seeing around a 3% conversion for users… And then the conversion rate from trail to paid is more like 90%, which is staggering.”

And voice doesn’t just help drive sales of digital goods, such as one-off extra lives in games and subscriptions to premium content; it can lead to increased physical sales, such as train tickets and groceries, and it’s even being used in-store to sell products.

The second example of how voice is increasing conversions comes from The Mars Agency. It’s trialing an in-store voice assistant called SmartAisle with retailer BevMo!, which helps customers decide which whisky to buy. Here’s how it works: An Amazon Echo is installed on an illuminated shelving unit in the whisky aisle in-store. Customers stand in front of the Echo and talk out loud to the SmartAisle skill. In turn, the Echo responds with information about certain types of whisky and guides the customer through a decision-making process. The shelving unit has lights under each bottle and, as the conversation progresses and the assistant begins whittling down the selection, the lights under the ruled-out whiskies dim. At the end of the experience, the customer is left with one whisky bottle illuminated on the shelf. Bree Glaeser, Director of Innovation at The Mars Agency, told me: “People don’t always want to go with the opinion of the store clerk.”

SmartAisle not only engages customers in-store, but above all else, it actually converts browsers to buyers. The stores that have trialed the assistant, and Brooke Hawkins, Senior Voice User Interface Designer at The Mars Agency, said: “We’re definitely consistently seeing sales lift in the stores that SmartAisle is deployed in.”

The Shopping Mall of the Future

The rise of smart speakers with screens could open the door for voice shopping to actually become what it’s forecast to be. Devices like the Echo Show and Google Home Hub are the beginning of the multi-modal voice experience, where you can see a screen and control it with your voice. Extend this to the Fire Stick TV with Alexa on-board, and the TV could easily become the shopping mall of the future.

Voice is also being extended into the web by companies like Voysis. Rather than wasting time with filtering and searching on a retailer’s website, customers using Voysis can just ask for “a pair of red men’s Nike’s trainers under $100 in a size 9” and Voysis will do the filtering for you.

Then there’s the emerging use case of the car. Being able to shop for groceries or order takeout from the car creates a completely new environment where people will be able to shop. With almost all major car manufacturers, including Mercedes, BMW, Tesla and Ford shipping new motors with in-car voice assistants, and devices like the Amazon Alexa Echo Auto equipping older vehicles with a voice assistant, you’ll soon be able to order those flowers you forgot for Mother’s Day, place a bet on the big game, or impulsively purchase an audiobook to listen to on your way home, all from within your vehicle and all without taking your eyes off the road.

Whether or not you believe the hype of the forecasted numbers, there is simply too much traction and potential with voice shopping for it not to be something that can seriously impact your business. With that said, it doesn’t come without its own challenges.

First, there are challenges for retailers, including:

• Data ownership. If you choose to use one of the top two platforms, Alexa or Google Assistant, then they’ll ultimately have visibility into all of your skill or action activity, including what your users are asking for and buying. That’s pretty compelling competitive intelligence.

• Commission. For a truly seamless experience, you’ll need to use a native payment service, like Amazon Pay or Google Pay. For that, there’s a charge.

• Competition. Amazon’s aim is to be the place where you can buy anything online. That means that, whether or not you compete with Amazon today, you might tomorrow. As Joshua Montgomery, CEO of Mycroft told me, “If you’re in business, you’re probably going to compete with Amazon someday.” With that said, how Amazon treats competing products on Alexa is yet to be seen.

Second, there are challenges for consumers, including:

• Difficulty browsing. Although we can speak faster than we can type, it’s quicker to scan a list of search results than it is to listen to those results read back audibly. This means that general browsing, a common product research behavior, is a challenge on voice.

• Difficulty discovering possibilities. Discovering voice applications is a challenge. So finding out what shopping facilities exist on voice and understanding how to access them can be a challenge for some.

• Cognitive load. There’s also a cognitive load placed on the user in order to access a third-party experience. For example, having to say “Alexa, ask [brand] to [do something]” relies on the user knowing a) that the brand exists on the platform and b) that the brand provides the option for you to do that something.

How Shoud E-Commerce Brands Prepare for Voice Shopping

So, how should companies be preparing for voice shopping? When preparing a voice strategy, the first thing to understand is that voice is more than the two big platforms, Alexa and Google Assistant. Voice is an interface to technology. Your ultimate goal, then, should be for a voice interface to overlay all of your customer touch points, from smart speakers and voice assistants to your website, apps, phone lines, and even in-store experiences. For this, you’ll need to develop your skills and understanding of voice user interface (VUI) design practices so that you can match a user’s context and needs with your solution.

As with a website or app, a great front-end is rarely useful unless it’s connected to a smart backend, and this is where voice excels. As part of your voice strategy, the front-end should be integrated with your current line of business systems to take advantage of the intelligence you already have. This will enable you to surface products, pricing, stock levels, and previous purchases, and give you a basis for processing transactions and answering product-related questions.

By integrating voice with your business systems, voice becomes something that can push your business forward, rather than becoming just a shiny new gimmick. And once you’ve established the basics of product ordering and research, you’ll then be in a position to dig deeper into things like personalization, recommendations, and using the data you’ve gathered to improve or even create new product lines or content based on what your customers are actively asking you for.

Making voice an integral part of your business won’t happen overnight, but businesses who put the wheels in motion now can be out in-front in a year’s time. But first, you need to get off the starting blocks.