Often the purchase journey includes redundant steps of the conversation funnel with each step increasing the chance for potential customers to abandon the purchase and the store forever. Subsequently, businesses face a challenge with process gamification and sales through affordable tactics and not for resolving genuine consumer problems. Thus, to make your online business a success you need to have products/solutions that genuinely solve a problem.
Streamline purchase makes purchase easy when the customer is the most engaged and active.
It is necessary to find the products personally and for streamlining the purchase, stop finding gamification or any low value offers pushing the purchase. It is necessary to examine the proper use of technology for creating fantastic customer experiences. The best eCommerce brands work with social commerce and it is a good idea to consider the customers and their actions. The potential customers are on social networks and make their purchase through the networks. There is no need to complicate things with steps requiring gamification for paltry conversions. Implementing the social commerce engaging users at their location transforming the social networking engagement into sales. You can use social commerce for increasing brand revenue.
What is Social Commerce?
This refers to the process of product selling on social networking sites directly. With the social commerce platform, the shopping experience right from the product discovery, research and checking out the process on the social networking. Today the common social apps for commerce are Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. With social commerce, people can purchase on the app quickly and after completing the purchase you can continue with the feeds. Shopping opportunities are galore on the online platform with people using most of these so it is up to the businesses.
In simple words, we can say Social Commerce is about making your online eCommerce business accessible via Social Networking Platforms – Social eCommerce.
Social Commerce Vs. E-commerce
Ecommerce is shopping experiences through branded apps or websites and social commerce allows the customers to purchase within the social networking experiences. Both these things are different and social commerce differs from social selling too. Social selling is the cultivation of social media relationships to create a sales potential list.
Why do E-commerce Brands Adopt Social Commerce?
If you are not sure of the reasons for setting up shop on social media, here are some of the associated benefits to consider.
Shopping turns into a social experience with social commerce: Shopping experiences on the social media platform is highly interactive more than the regular e-commerce methods. Consumers can consult with friends when making purchases, flaunt the things they buy, and write reviews to let others know about brands and their products. There is no need to miss any social aspect of the purchase, social commerce is the ideal choice.
It is possible to make serious money: Research shows that e-sales is going to give huge returns in future. Businesses can have a piece of action by selling their products online right to the customers. For 48% of Pinterest users, shopping is a top priority and 81% of people research things on Facebook and Instagram so it is in the interest of businesses to give them what they want.
Remove friction with social commerce: find the product, click on it, and purchase as the social media shops make the process easy and without friction. It is one smooth process from the discovery stage to purchase. Every mouse click gives the potential customers a chance to change the mind. They may go from the business advertisement to the site, add the product to the cart, and fill in the credit card information. Through the process, people can lose attention anytime. It is possible to take away the unnecessary steps and bring shopping to social media platforms.
Immediate focus group with social commerce: social commerce makes the transaction faster and offers a fantastic way to gather feedback. The goods catalogue of business is available for consumer review and discussion. The customers directly tell the businesses about their likes and dislikes. The audience can have a vote on inventory decisions and product development. On social, clear data is available on your customers and an opportunity to interact with them via direct message or comments providing bespoke customer services.
Hyper-target the prime audience: on social, huge customer data is available for the business to target and tweak the advertising. You can market the products to people that desire them. With social commerce, you can get ready-to-buy, specific products to people and this is not possible with traditional marketing and eCommerce.
The favourite shopping destination for Gen Z and the Millennials: people in the age group of 18 and 34 are already online, ready to shop as they scroll. In the year 2019, 48% of shoppers belonging to this age group made purchases through social media. Even those that have not tried this yet are willing to try this sometime soon.
Today only a handful of social platforms give you a chance to shop for products and services but as both revenue and interests grow, you find more brands on social media integrating the option, “shop now”.
Currently available platforms with social commerce are the following.
Facebook Shops
People use the business page on Facebook for connecting with fans, show off the new brand logo, and share the news. You can use this to sell certain things as well simply by setting up a Facebook shop fully customized to business requirements. Consider the goods or collections to feature with customization of images, colours and fonts suiting the brand. Import existing product catalogue from the website, even create one right from the scratch. The shop is accessible from the Page, the Shopping ads on Instagram, Instagram profile, or shoppable post and stories. During the conversion time, there is an option for the customers to perform in-app checkout, open Messenger chat directly for business. This is a good way to send them to the business website and create a test shop for learning more. Add items, test the customer experiences, and manage orders here.
Pinterest
This platform does not offer social commerce strictly and in the case of business accounts, there is no option of creating Product Pins, displayed in the platform’s Shop. You cannot purchase these inside the app but there is no purchase availability within the application. This is a useful tool to get your products out in the market.
Instagram Shops
Studies show that 60% of people find new products here so getting your product here is a good idea. The users can buy the products on Instagram shops featured in the videos and photos from anywhere within the app. First set up the Facebook Shop and the Instagram Shop pulls data from the FB catalogue. The business profile creates storefront customization pages acting as curating product collection for sale. There is a detail page for each product featuring a detailed description, media, and pricing. The related shopping tags let businesses tag the products in the posts or Stories. There is another option of highlighting products in bios and post captions. For eligible creators and businesses, Instagram checkout allows customers to complete transactions through Facebook Pay. Without Checkout it is possible to use the other tools to complete an offsite purchase. For setting Instagram Shop create a business account connected to a FB page. Compliance with merchant agreement and commerce policies is necessary. These shops just sell products and not any services.
In 2020, this platform announced a beta closed launch for the Brand Profiles.
Effective Tactics for an Efficient Social Commerce
Improve Messenger Engagements: Turn the engagements on FB to automated chatbots via Messenger and this drives engagement.
Create Checkouts Through Automated Bots: The new tools have automated pre-built checkout chatbots. Within minutes start the checkout automated bot across social platforms.
Manage Social Shopping through Your E-commerce Store: This tool integrates multiple channels for managing the omnichannel strategy. Various tools allow quick integration of products to FB stores, Pinterest buyable Pins, and Instagram tags.
Collect Emails: After making the sale, the strategy is to grab the email ID to utilize a marketing strategy. Opting-in to email, nurture these over in the coming months and weeks.
Engage with Followers: Ensure good experiences of social commerce, remembering its social part is important. Answer questions, interesting content, and offer value, to be authentic and human.
An Easy and Cost-Effective Way To Do Online Business
Today, increased mobile usage is seen as more people turn to social networking platform in different areas of life. People spend time on the phone and expect easy and quick solutions to problems. They share everything on social platforms. People should make the most of the behaviours and sell through channels engaged through checkouts. This was not possible for the small brands some years ago as the required cost and effort for the social campaigns was only possible for the multi-national, large brands. Modern tools like jumper.ai and ManyChat make it easier for the brands these days irrespective of the size and benefit from the trend of social commerce. This is the perfect time to start as this phenomenon would blow beyond everyone’s expectations.
Waiting to see the results will only put the business on the back foot so start the social networking campaign today.
