How Would The Tree of E-commerce Grow In The Earth of 5G Technology
The development of E-commerce always goes with the development of Internet technology. Back in the last century, maybe no one could imagine that people could buy anything from anywhere at any time only with a click on a webpage, but it happens today due to the well-developed Internet. Now, people say that we are facing the fourth industrial revolution with the innovation of 5G technology (Paredes, Feb 2020), and it is predicted that 5G tech will greatly influence E-commerce in near future.
5G tech, the fifth generation of mobile network technology, is said to be 100 times faster than 4G technology which means much lower latency of Internet use. It will make influences on E-commerce in different forms directly or indirectly. The M-commerce, aka Mobile E-commerce, will undoubtedly be impacted at first as the most representative type of E-commerce today. It is reported that 5G will generate about $12 billion in revenue for M-commerce by 2021 (Sterling, March 2018). How? Let’s check the possible development of E-commerce due to 5G technology.
Better Customer Service
The high-speed of 5G tech will provide customers a better user experience when suffering online. Besides this, it could reduce the possibility of encountering error pages or lag when purchasing online which helps to retain customers.
By accelerating the application of Virtual Reality (VR) technique and Augmented Reality (AR) technique, 5G will help M-commerce to form a new type of online shopping service. With the VR and AR technology, customers are allowed to preview how a product performs in their scenarios. For example, customers could check whether a piece of furniture fits the decorating style in their houses by using the 3D model of this furniture in the AR camera or VR stimulation. This application is predicted to increase the possibility that customers make purchase decisions and Ikea is building its VR experience program (Saltis, September 2020).
AI assistance will have a better performance in providing service with 5G technology. Firstly, AI assistance could respond to customer’s requests more quickly so that customers will no longer lose their patience due to long responding time. Secondly, AI assistance could get more cloud computing resources to provide better answers to the customer’s query. One good example is H&M’s chatbot service which could provide apparel suggestions (Lucas, August 2019).
New Types of E-commerce
The development of 5G technology will bring us something new indeed, just like 4G tech has created the Local On-demand E-commerce such as Uber and food delivery business. However, what kinds of new business models will bring to us is still unknown since everything is possible only with enough imagination. Maybe we could foresee what could happen according to what we have now. Like Amazon Go is a no cashier store (Wikipedia) and the Chatbot could provide customer service instead of representatives. One newly developing 5G-related technology is the auto-driving car which requires no drivers to run. Based on these, a non-human business model may appear in the future due to the innovation of 5G technology. Who knows?
Problems Come Simultaneously
As every coin has two sides, the repaid development of E-commerce with 5G tech may raise some problems at the same time. For example, although the Chatbot technique can answer most questions people ask, some customers still want to talk with real human representatives because they do not trust chatbots. On the other side, people are worried about the safety issues of the non-driver car since programs probably do not know how to deal with emergencies. What’s more, if the E-commerce companies choose to shift to a non-human business model, they will take relevant responsibility for increasing the unemployment rate.
If you ask someone “what is the difference between the 5G network and the 4G network?”, the only answer you may get is “5G is faster than 4G”. If you ask someone “how will 5G change this world?”, he or she probably has no idea, just like asking the same question about 4G technology in 2009, the beginning of 4G time(Jansson).
It is hard to exactly predict how 5G will impact E-commerce and this world, but it is exciting to expect what will happen to E-commerce and this world. Let’s see!
