Pod S9 EP 1 | Geekspeak Podcast - Top Trends in Ecommmerce 2025
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from C more Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk about something, search marketing like Google ads or SEO, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
If you're a aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this Podcast for you. We're going to share the best SEO search, social, uh, and website strategies. We share tips and hacks, Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market. Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing.
Phelan: Hello there. It is Geek Speak. It's that time of the week where this week we're going to be talking about top e [00:01:00] commerce trends in 2025. I think that's going to be a big one as well. I think that there's a lot of interesting things that are showing up. There's old stuff that I thought wasn't going to come back up, but apparently is surging again, and we'll talk all about it.
Phelan: My name is Phelan at Seymour Digital Media.
Rina: And I'm Rena from Littleworks Indymedia.
Phelan: Yes. And I'm just into the group. But I think the first place that I was a little surprised about that I saw the data for was AR. So augmented reality. So that was one that was popular about two years ago.
Phelan: was popular. Sephora had a big app that like let you like try different makeups on your face. My understanding was also it was like a little technically difficult as well to go and just do because you got it. VR is a bit easier because it's like a contained universe where it's like AR has to like, superimpose itself on an existing world.
Phelan: And so there's lots of complications. That's why I'd like the Google Glass was [00:02:00] going to be complicated because The world's got a lot of stuff that's going on. And so just having like automatically detecting stuff was difficult.
Rina: Yeah. So I think in my life, I've been using it with glasses, primarily on glasses shops.
Rina: Like you were saying, it's usually makeup or glasses or something that you can put on your haircuts. That's the other one where I've seen it. I haven't really seen it anywhere else or any other. Styles of how it could work, just the application of how you put it on yourself. I haven't seen anything else I understand that you can you can reorganize your room for like day quarter stores and things like that, but I've never experienced it.
Rina: So I don't really know how it works. If you upload photos or if or if you. Just point your camera. Have you had any experience with that?
Phelan: Yeah, because Shopify was at the forefront of AR, so they made a really big push. I guess when I was there in 2018, it was just coming to the fro, like that's when they were first rolling it [00:03:00] out.
Phelan: My understanding was the biggest issue you have is like hiring a company to do a modeling. And so there's a special file you can attach with a product so that they can go Hey, try this out in the real world. And you have a vase and then you can point it at your table and it would only work on iPhone.
Phelan: That's another thing is that iPhone was the company pushing that. So it was really only available on iPhone. So there's a bunch of technical limitations that are put on it. And also to my knowledge, it was also like. Really expensive to get a company to make you this file of a 3D model of your product which was inhibiting it.
Phelan: So I'm, that's another reason why I was a little surprised by it. I was making a resurgence. Not that I think it's inherently bad or anything, it's just more surprising that it was coming back.
Rina: I think the cost will come down as that sort of they reorganize the technology and other and people pick it up and it becomes more adopted into regular shopping experience.
Rina: But I found it. Okay. [00:04:00] I didn't really love it. I'm not really sure that the lipstick colors were actually accurate on your lips. Because of course, it really depends on opacity in terms of how something actually works on your lips compared to what it looks like on a photo. And then the other part that I I really didn't like the experience of of putting glasses on.
Rina: I didn't trust the feature very much. I will, and then you want to also see your head from all angles. And I wasn't really. And that's the part that I didn't really trust. So I did end up using it. I did end up buying a pair of glasses, but I did view those glasses as my emergency glasses, not my fashion forward glasses.
Rina: It was fine for what it was. I'm not sure I love it yet, but so we'll be looking at that, but definitely more things that you can have to help your people make decisions. buying. There's an art gallery that we're working with and we're organizing this X, this third party app that you can have not the client putting the stuff into there.
Rina: Not [00:05:00] putting the paintings on. In your room, but putting the paintings in a room or a series of rooms to see what something looks like to get a sense of scale because scale is the other thing. So it's not only what do things look like on you, but what scale is it at? It's always hard to tell.
Rina: I remember buying something. I forgot what it was. I think it was a bowl and I literally thought the bowl was It's huge because it took up the whole frame of the photo where I was purchasing it. But of course it ended up being like this stupid thing that I gave away in my buy nothing group because I totally didn't take out my measuring tape and check the measurements.
Rina: So that's one thing that we have to think about ways of showing scale, ways of showing, color, ways of showing how it looks on you. That's just all going to evolve. And And improve as we go, I think
Phelan: yeah, would agree with that. I would definitely context is a difficult one, especially like you said of glasses and makeup, right?
Phelan: Cause it's it's like tiny, like little [00:06:00] increments will make a big difference. Yes. Yes. Like
Rina: eyebrows or not, like where does it exactly sit? Yeah. So let's get into some of the ones that are more applicable for our target market in terms of who we think is watching this. Video, which would be things like, I really am interested in the AI driven personalization.
Rina: Organizing how people how things are curated for your client based on data that you've already collected. So if they've made one purchase instead of having instead of having somebody else. Set that criteria of what shows up next. Sometimes it's the wrong thing completely.
Rina: So sometimes you bought the one thing and then it'll show you related products. And just because it's tagged in the same tag you either want one or the other, you don't want to be buying both, but you could be buying something with a completely different tag that actually goes with that thing. So something that compliments it, a pair or an accessory or.
Rina: Something else. So I'm actually very excited about that and [00:07:00] having to get out of maybe doing so many tags as we have been doing to make that happen. And yeah,
Phelan: I was just going to say that's one of the ones where again I've, I fall back on AI actually being good because what it is, it's a regression algorithm at its core.
Phelan: So what it will do is Hey, a person with these characteristics. Bought this product at this time with these. So of all the hundreds of others, people that bought this product, we've noticed a trend that there's like these people bought these two things together. So it can be one that can help you with regressing a lot of data into simple Hey, this person also did this thing.
Phelan: We should recommend this to this person. Like that to me makes a lot of sense.
Rina: Yeah. Because you don't, as a business owner, you don't actually have to. Think about that. That's something you to now just put on the shelf and check in every now and again to make sure it's operating properly but it's very nice that is, because that can be a really creative that's almost like I look [00:08:00] at that is almost Merchandising in a way.
Rina: It's like the new online merchandising. So what you would be doing in your displays in your windows and You know in your store space this actually can help To create that feeling online rather than just putting up, lifestyle or group shots in your banners and that this could really be merchandising as a different form.
Rina: So if anyone is in the merchandising arena and understands that is taking that course or or has taken those credentials, I would love to hear if there's anything that's being taught. In the schools on online merchandising as a thing, because that's what popped up into my head.
Phelan: Yeah,
Rina: the other thing I have a lot to talk about on this topic.
Rina: Is the rise of social commerce. Social media is where Favorite part of marketing is. So I spend a lot of time on social and I buy a lot on social. So it's really like my favorite space. And what [00:09:00] we're looking at here on the notes is platforms like obviously take talk and Instagram where there is influencer.
Rina: The influencer aspect, and then there's Pinterest that's organizing itself as a full fledged marketplace, like as Amazon is, if you're thinking about what it, what is a marketplace, Amazon is that marketplace where multiple sellers are in a space and doing that. So the idea is that these platforms are now becoming more like a marketplace.
Rina: And giving Amazon a run for its money. It's got it. They've got their own search functions. They've got their own way of organizing the material in different ways. And we're consuming it differently and making purchases quite differently. Now, the one thing that I wanted to talk about, which is pretty interesting is this notion of influencer, because I always come across.
Rina: clients who are looking to work with influencers. We want to figure out how to show ROI for influencer campaigns. That's always the challenge in social, but more so with influencer [00:10:00] stuff. And and I have a few little tricks that I use for my clients. And one is whenever you're going to put something out on social anywhere, because it's harder to track unless you've got.
Rina: running as it is a little bit harder to track organic. So what I usually do is I use some kind of voucher code so that if you're running a campaign in a space, so for example, one influencer on tick tock, they would have their own, little discount code. That's. It's personalized to them so that you can actually track the ROI much, much better than if you were just asking for or using a generic, 20 percent off voucher code.
Rina: If you brand all of your voucher codes, that really helps with tracking and figuring it all out. Unless you're using honey. Yes, that is true. But I actually, yes, that is true. That is true. There are lots of people using honey. And but I,
Phelan: Honey, honey's gone out of business. They are not going to exist as a current business.
Rina: Oh, so I should [00:11:00] eat up all my points and take all the gift cards now is what you're saying.
Phelan: There you have a class action lawsuit from every influencer on the internet. Because what they did is they subverted the everyone's coupon codes with their own and which was a big violation of the TOS that they were Yeah, so there's a big thing that happened with Honey is that they are being sued into oblivion because they stole millions of dollars from every influencer online that promoted them.
Phelan: And so they are. Oh, I see. I didn't know that. Okay. That's interesting. They do have some other aspects to their business model that I really like, but let's just stick to this for a second because the other point that I wanted to talk about with influence or marketing is I've been. Following very particular influencers recently and attending their lives and the, their, around the conversation of what's gonna happen with TikTok, which I know that Phelan, and you and I were talking about that right before we jumped on the call.
Rina: But one of the things that I hadn't really considered is that [00:12:00] the, so the tick tock shop is another way that influencers make money. So they might actually have promotion with a company and do that sort of partnership model, but there's also the shop that's organized, but what I was really Surprised to hear that some of the biggest influencers that I follow who are actually selling things regularly and are, have huge audiences are not making money on the shop anyways.
Rina: So I found that was interesting and I don't know if there's a spot. I'm, I wanted to look at that cause I actually literally just. I just listened in on a conversation yesterday about this. I want to go and see if I can find out if there's any public data on how effective the stores are.
Rina: Who's making what are the numbers that are of sales that are generated on the TikTok shop? Because I think that might dispel. Some myths. I don't know if it's just this influencer is like maybe taking on products that isn't vibing with their audience or if it really is a [00:13:00] shop issue or what is the issue?
Rina: I like to look at these things and try and pull them apart and figure out what's going on, but I don't have any answers for this. Question that I'm posing so how much money will be, and I do know that there are some influencers that are making quite a bit of revenue. They've disclosed their revenue.
Rina: And of course we have to factor in if they're telling the truth or not, cause that's another thing. But it's hard to say what's happening on Tik Tok shop. Do you know any data storage places that we can find that information?
Phelan: Yeah, one thing about that, that I do, I'm aware of is that if someone's on Forbes and they will disclose any information, I know that Forbes ruthlessly goes through, like you have to submit tax forms.
Phelan: You've got to submit like all the information. So anything that's on Forbes, I know is verified, like they don't just take your word for it. Like you have to submit paperwork to them. They review it and then they tell you what they found. So that's one thing I would say. Generally, yeah.
Phelan: Like I'm always interested to see. [00:14:00] Because it's a, it's, yeah, there's all, and there's always so one other thing is about people that say oh, I made $10 million off of my Shopify store, and they show you their Shopify app and they say, I made this much. They're not telling you what the cost was.
Phelan: That got them to that point as well. Yeah. Yes. So they could have $10,000 a day, but they're spending $9,000 or that 90. That's. 9, 000 on Facebook ads, like there's they're not actually making as big a profit as you would imagine. So always take any time they're showing you like a verified thing, take it with a grain of salt that those numbers, unless you get the full context of how much they spent going into it and how much it's like how much money they're actually making out of it.
Phelan: That's definitely one that to keep in mind. So I recently went on a webinar and I was actually shocked to see that they had that they weren't showing revenue only. They actually also put in profit. Which I was really [00:15:00] impressed by because those are good numbers to really get a sense because yeah, you're absolutely correct.
Rina: You need to take out your expenses of how you're getting those sales if you're using ads. So some people get on those calls and they hear they get all starry eyed with the revenue numbers. And and that can be, as you say very just
Phelan: misleading.
Rina: Misleading. Thanks. That was the word I was looking for.
Rina: What about the one thing that I'm not really sure about from my perspective is the numbers about voice and visual search. That's another thing that we need to organize for in e commerce. And I use voice search a lot. In my life. So I just assume everyone else is doing it too, but maybe not.
Rina: And then a visual search. I've only just started using that in practical ways. Usually I'm looking at it from a marketer's perspective, and I'm looking for the original source of the image that we're using, for copyright infringement. Violations, things like that, but I've never [00:16:00] actually used it.
Rina: I realized to find products, for example. So tell us what you know about visual and voice search. I'm interested to know from an SEO perspective, cause I don't, that's not an area that is my expertise.
Phelan: Yeah. So the voice search I've never done it really for a product mostly because like I'm too.
Phelan: Paranoid about making the wrong decision. So I don't just like on a whim, just be like, Hey, get me X, Y, Z thing. I want to look at it. I want to see what the price, maybe I can get it at a different store. So I'm just a very picky shopper when it comes to something like that. The visual search. So that's the main use case that I've seen is called Google lens.
Phelan: So if you have you can like zoom in on it and I've. I've used it to search, generally I found it's not as good as Google says that it is. So that's one thing. And how do you do
Rina: that?
Phelan: I've seen the promotional material, right? [00:17:00] Where they're like, hey, you can search it like this. And they like show you how you can box something out.
Phelan: And then I tried to do it. And just, it goes back to what we were talking about with AR. The real world is messy, and it's a little bit off, and the angle's not going to be right, and so the machine learning is not going to get it perfect, and generally I found that it gives me the wrong answer.
Phelan: This may be smoothed out over time, but I'm suspecting that the real world is just really messy, so if you have a real world picture of course the ones that they all used were like these Fashion like high def like huge and it was super obvious like the what they squared out Which most people I don't think are gonna be doing that.
Phelan: You're gonna be looking at your friend's image of them on vacation And they have a I don't know something in their hands and but it's not gonna be perfect. And so I find that Generally, it's still gonna be some text based search like text the reason my text does really well is because It's easy to model out, like to model, like how [00:18:00] to organize information.
Phelan: Words are super easy. Visuals are messy, complex things. And that's just the reality of life.
Rina: The the visual search I'm understanding is limited to how the person organizes the alt tag and any other tags that they can add to the image. Is that correct? Am I understanding that correctly?
Phelan: It's one portion, they do have a component where they do Google, like I'm using only Google for this context, because that's the one I'm the most familiar with, is that Google also allots millions to billions of images, and then has those on store of a, hey, this handbag looks like this, like it has these distinct features, and they do edge mapping around it.
Phelan: And so they can do it off of the visuals, the alt text, Is there is definitely their crutch that they rely upon. Is that you organize the data that goes in? It's like anything with Google, the better you organize. Like the reason why it's called search engine [00:19:00] optimization is because you're optimizing it.
Phelan: So it's easy for Google to understand what's going on rather than getting them to guess what's going on with this image.
Rina: Cause I think one of the things that I one of the places where I feel like image. Image tagging is super important is in the vintage and second hand markets because that is one area that I actually do upload photos.
Rina: So I have a few things that come by that I that come by my way and I want to look up the value of them. So I'll take a photo and I'll upload it and I'll see what I can find. And often there's nothing and it's funny. Because it shouldn't be something that's nothing in my mind, because these things still exist in the real world.
Rina: They're not that old, and they're not that, it's usually a china pattern or something like that. So I find that really intriguing, and I'm wondering if that's just because my stereotype. Of what a vintage reseller person is [00:20:00] like is not really tech forward, and they'll rely only on the images and not realize that people actually have to search those images.
Rina: So I think that, image description is for me when it comes to search. Is way more important now than it ever used to be, right? So we used to just put when we were hacking it for SEO, we used to just put whatever keyword in it. Didn't matter if it described the image or not.
Rina: Then we stopped doing that a few years ago when, accessibility became very prevalent and now and now it just seems like you want to describe the image for the accessibility, absolutely, but you want to make sure that those. Relevant keywords to be found in visual search is going, they're gonna pop up.
Rina: It's gonna pop up for that too. So that's just adds an extra layer in my mind when I'm thinking about organic, SEO, yeah. Okay, so that and that's probably one of the most practical things about thinking out from a business owner and the trends that are happening. So Pip asked this really interesting question because of course, [00:21:00] Pip was supposed to be on this call with you, not me.
Rina: But but what she says will voice it. And visual search become mainstream or remain niche. And I hadn't really thought of it as a niche tool before, but but that for as far as search results go, that could be your way in. In fact, because if you're not, if the world is not like me focused on that, on optimizing for that search, just like YouTube a few years ago if there's an opportunity where the market is not saturated, that would be a great way for your stuff to be found.
Rina: Even if your products in the regular search is saturated, you could actually deviate slightly from whatever your on page key, a keyword tactic is by, by using those bigger bucket keywords in your image. Would you say that's
Phelan: Yeah, I would say, I would agree with you that you have slightly more opportunity with the visual search.
Phelan: I'm not as [00:22:00] convinced with the voice search mostly because it's been very limited in like when it gives you an answer it only gives you one answer like whereas like Google search results give you like three and then you can pick which one you actually like out of it. So I think it's a little over determined.
Rina: I didn't even notice that. So when you do voice, it only gives you one option, one search result. Ah, I had never even noticed that. Okay. So I am just like being led by Google to very particular places, which is actually interesting because I did remember listening to a podcast a few years ago that talked about how visual search was going to be super important because of everybody using.
Rina: And what are those things called? Those in home speaker things that you ask Alexa and Google at
Phelan: home or something like that. Yeah.
Rina: Yeah. And that the, this person had suggested that there will be tiered services so that you will pay to come up first in the search results on voice in particular, so that when [00:23:00] I want to say, Hey, Alexa, add.
Rina: Shop, I need toilet toilet paper, and it'll send me just to the one place that's actually paid for that placement. And then I will be purchasing from that particular store whether I like it or not, which is a really weird concept because we have we have been thinking about, other than ads, how is Google organic going to because only certain people can get that one that we've actually made it worse than online searching, where you have maybe five to eight results.
Rina: Now you're just going to get the one, which is going to make it way more competitive. That is super interesting.
Phelan: Okay. Going off that they, it was an old, I'm not sure they didn't promote it as much, but it was, Amazon was the big proponent of what you just talked about and they were doing something called Amazon Home Services.
Phelan: So plumbers, cleaners, like anything that related to your home, that was going to be a big one. And it was going to be just a giant race to the bottom.
Rina: That, yeah,
Phelan: like you said, it was just one decision. [00:24:00] Yeah. So
Rina: we've actually got a lot more content to go through. I'm actually thinking we should schedule a part two.
Rina: But or at least take, maybe take drop shipping out, but yeah let's let's look at what was the next one that I was. Oh, yes, this one I thought was really interesting. Sustainability as a standard. I thought this was interesting because of the political climate that we're moving into, that seems to be moving away from all of these sort of progressive ideas that we were really honing in on, which was sustainability.
Rina: And not in this conversation, but the the diversity stuff, which I've heard is. Being reformatted and changed on all sorts of company websites, but let's talk about sustainability a bit in terms of excuse me. How are we balancing sustainability? Which tends to, it does tend to cost a little bit more with with eco sorry, with cost efficiency.
Rina: Do you have any thoughts on that? Cause I do. [00:25:00] Yeah, I definitely do. Big container ships, I think they're rolling them out this year. But the, so one way that you can move a ship is with the wind. And one thing sails are, pretty antiquated, but there's a really weird technology that was developed in the 1920s that you have a giant column at the front of your boat.
Phelan: And if you spin that column, it will make your boat go forward or make your boat go backwards. If you spend it the opposite way.
Rina: Oh, interesting. And so how do they, and how are they going to
Phelan: Basically, they use diesel to get them out of port, then they activate the big column, and then they just use that as a sail.
Rina: I got it, so wind. Okay, got it. But you couldn't choose to go forward or backwards because the wind would take you there. How would you organize that? I don't even know how to conceive that.
Phelan: It's one of the weirdest things. A go look up the column on a ship. It's, it doesn't make sense.
Phelan: It breaks your brain watching it work. But, yeah, basically if you just spin a column one way, it'll make it, [00:26:00] make a ship go forward. And it doesn't it just is the weirdest thing ever.
Rina: So I think one of the things that so that deals with shipping and that's definitely one part of sustainability.
Rina: The other part of sustainability is how you host your website. That's, you can also do that with carbon credits if you want to, or other kinds of credits. I've been doing that with my with my servers for quite some time now, and we. We buy into projects, Canadian projects.
Rina: I used to use GreenGeeks and do it that way, but now I do Canadian projects and I host separately to offset that. But what about things like thinking about packaging and, and all of that sort of stuff. I feel like in my mind, that's important to me. I feel like the environment is important to me.
Rina: And that's something that I will work towards. But we're talking about trends in e commerce. I wonder if that is, it can be used, and this is how I think about it, as connecting with your community and building a strong brand connection with people, [00:27:00] as long as you don't get caught greenwashing, because that's not going to work.
Rina: You actually have to have your heart and soul in this for it to be for it to be All right. A good time for me to have a little cough. Yeah, so basically that's one thing that'll be interesting to see because I was much more confident on the trends for this topic for sustainability before the election.
Rina: And before I've seen what some companies are moving towards. So you can see that there are brands out there that will just. Flop with the wind in terms of whatever the political climate is. And then there are visionaries who actually have a passion for a particular way of doing business that is really important to them and that they'll maintain no matter what.
Rina: And I think that's, you got to figure out what, where you stand on that as to how you deal with these issues. Should we also
Phelan: just quickly say that as well, packaging trends are also super important. So the more that a [00:28:00] company moves towards cardboard. Scrapboard can be reused up to seven times after its first use and is incredibly light and very strong for what it does.
Phelan: If companies move more towards that and it's a more sustainable product than obviously any petroleum product that goes into it. Yeah, I was super, super annoyed in the eighties when they took away plastic paper bags and replaced them with plastic bags.
Phelan: Yeah,
Rina: because that seemed counterintuitive to me.
Rina: It seemed like building up the recyclable materials at that point would have been a much better option. But, now we've got the plastic issues. We're over time and then we should tap it here and we can actually try and figure out a part two for us moving forward. Which I think will.
Rina: Deal more with market spaces and that type of thing other than e commerce, your own website. So thanks for joining us. We're in the business marketing mixer group in Facebook. If you want to actually join the community, if not, we're here. We stream live wherever you found [00:29:00] us is where you'll find us at 11 a.
Rina: m. Pacific time for joining.
Phelan: Thanks. Bye.
