To Succeed in 2018, Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Must Focus on This One Change With more businesses competing for customers, it's time to speed things up.

For 2018 trends, we asked an expert on what entrepreneurs can expect this coming year in e-commerce.

For merchants and retailers, ecommerce automation has started to become a huge deal, and companies leveraging it have a massive competitive advantage. Give it a little bit of time, but it will soon become table stakes.

You can automate all kinds of different things. Take fraud, for example. You can now set a rule in your ecommerce platform that if an order comes in that is deemed "medium risk," an email automatically goes to the finance department to check it out. For a high-risk order you can set a rule to automatically cancel the order. It's like marketing automation, but even more powerful.