As the web progresses the expectations of digital consumers keep growing. Not only is it vital for merchants to offer personalized shopping experiences nowadays, but they must also make their products available to consumers in a variety of channels.

In order to obtain the best return on investment (ROI) from commerce initiatives in 2014, merchants must do a better job catering to their virtual shoppers’ wants and needs.

Luckily, the multitude of technology available on the ’Net can make it easier for merchants to give shoppers exactly what they want.

A powerful strategy that merchants can leverage in the New Year to satisfy their customers’ growing expectations is personalisation. Recent research has shown that 75 per cent of customers prefer retailers to use personal information to improve the shopping experience.

One simple, yet effective, way that merchants can personalize the shopping experience is with product recommendations. Online retailers, for example, offer a Recommendations platform that helps merchants deliver shopper-specific product recommendations across any channel based on past behaviors. Plus, the platform enables merchants to leverage multivariate testing tools to test different layouts and merchandising strategies with live shoppers.

Offering product recommendations, however, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to personalization strategies. In fact, merchants can launch personalized ad campaigns by leveraging retargeting platforms.

By doing so, merchants can serve personalized ads featuring previously viewed or recommended products to customers around the Web. In addition, email campaigns can be personalized.

Another significant strategy is to enable shopping across channels. today’s mobile world, consumers want to be able to make purchases from anywhere and everywhere, including from their smartphones and on social networks.

According to experts, this trend is referred to as distributed commerce. Essentially, distributed commerce enables consumers to purchase products wherever they happen to be browsing or shopping.

This concept is expected to disrupt the traditional e-commerce model in 2014.What remains a huge possibility is that consumers are expecting the ability to shop in context as well as where they are discovering products that interest them.

One way merchants can implement a distributed commerce strategy is by enabling social shopping. Retailers should begin to think of platforms that would enable merchants to create an e-commerce store on their Facebook profiles.

In addition, merchants can enable consumers to shop from platforms like Instagram which allows consumers to make purchases from the comment section of certain social networks.

Aside from social, experts suggest that merchants should also implement a mobile commerce strategy. They argue that not only is it essential to have a mobile site and app that allow customers to make purchases directly from their smartphones and tablets, but merchants can also implement other mobile technology, such as mobile deep linking platform, enabling businesses to link directly to apps from any form of marketing.

To put the best foot forward, analysts say, as the becomes more connected to the Internet, digital shoppers’ expectation will continue to grow, and the merchants that work hard to meet those expectations are sure to succeed in 2014. Those who don’t, however, stand to lose revenue to the competition. After all, the next e-commerce store is just a click away.