By: Renee Cooper, Social Media Manager
Here is an experience most online shoppers have had: you’re scrolling through your newsfeed and see the PERFECT pair of shoes, an eerily accurate meme T-shirt, or yet another advertisement for that slightly overpriced underwear. Giving into your curiosity on the price, you either scan through a carousel of images to view more items or tap through to the product page to eye the price, and possibly close the deal on a new purchase.
The process is all too familiar to most social media users, but the increasing focus on what’s known as social commerce may be a new term for both shoppers and sellers.
Social commerce is the selling of products directly within a social media platform. Most of or the entire the shopping experience happens without leaving the platform, or being referred to a separate website or product landing page.
The technology to make social commerce possible has been growing over the past decade. In 2015 Facebook rolled out the Shop Section that allowed fans to discover items and shop for items directly from a Business Page.
Pinterest also added a buy button to allow fans to purchase items directly from pinned images viewed on mobile devices. Just a year later Instagram launched product tags that showed the name and price of an item in an Instagram photo or video, and quickly linked to the item’s page on the store website.
Here are a few stats to show the increase in social commerce:
What does Social commerce look like going into 2020?
The early release of shoppable products and buyable pins still required businesses to have a website and a cart setup to handle orders and inventory most efficiently. With current social commerce technology, platforms are rolling out the ability for customers to place orders faster and with less clicks or actions than before.
Instagram Checkout is the next step in social commerce because it will keep the checkout experience directly from within Instagram. Currently only select large brands and influencers have this feature. More readily available to brands is Instagram Shopping, a tab that combines all tagged products into one timeline and leads shoppers directly to the product landing page when tapped.
Facebook’s Commerce Manager is a one-stop location for uploading products, categorizing items, managing orders, and running promotional ads.
Pinterest allows pinners to Shop the Look by selecting items within a photo that are available for purchase.
With such a strong drive toward social and mobile shopping in the new year, are you ready to go there with your ecommerce store?
