There are now more sale channels than ever before for customers to discover, research and purchase products.
For every brand that sells online, shortening the buyer's journey is a crucial optimisation when it comes to increasing sales — and social eCommerce, in all its forms, does just that.
When done properly, it can be the ultimate win, win scenario for both consumers and brands. The customer receives a highly relevant and frictionless shopping experience, and the brand builds trust while making a quick sale to the right person at the right time.
Brands doing it right
Marvel recently launched an automated chatbot campaign to sell tickets direct from organic and paid social media posts on facebook using a tool called jumper.ai. Jumper is a omni-channel chatbot solution.
What Is Social eCommerce?
Social eCommerce is simply the act of selling products or services directly through social media networks.
Most eCommerce purchase journeys are too complicated, relying on redirects from one platform to another (some platforms requiring multiple steps themselves).
However, with social eCommerce, you're effectively implementing Amazon's one-click buy now button on multiple, popular social media networks.
The Current State
Right now, the available channels that allow social eCommerce are Facebook's shoppable pages, Instagram's buy now button and Pinterest's buyable pins.
Breaking it all down here are some interesting statistics.
- 23% of shoppers are influenced by social media recommendations (so why not sell straight from that recommendation).
- 51% of millennials (who will soon be the major buying market) are likely to make a purchase over social media.
- 84% of shoppers review at least one social media site before purchasing (so it makes sense to sell where they're going to research).
Where it's all going
I'd put a sizeable bet that social eCommerce will become one of the primary sale channels for alot of brands in the next decade.
I am basing this prediction by looking at hows China's success with social apps like WeChat has created exponential growth for their eCommerce market over the past five years.
In China, brands are using social media to engage with customers at every stage of the purchase journey.
It seems right now the western world is very much playing a game of catch up as companies like Facebook roll out features that are currently available on WeChat and other Chinese based mobile apps.
Where the western world social media companies are seemingly innovating is with virtual reality, this is still however very much in its infancy but sheds a possible glimpse into the future.
Facebook Horzions - A possible future for social eCommerce
Facebook recently published a beta version app called Horizons, it's a cartoonish VR world created for the Oculus VR product range.
On first impressions, this new app seems very similar to the game/virtual world Second Life created by Linden Lab in 2003.
In Second Life you can create stores in the virtual world, it can be imagined that these new worlds in Horizons will in a similar fashion incorporate eCommerce by allowing the players to have a comparable shopping experience as they currently have in physical stores. Check out the video demo released by Facebook.
Social eCommerce is here to stay and will only get bigger and bigger over time.
If you wait to see how things pan out, you'll be putting yourself on the back foot and give yourself a lot of ground to make up.
If you're interested in finding out more about how your brand can benefit from utilising social eCommerce to shorten the buyer's journey, contact us.
