Ecommerce companies can no longer ignore social media. Social commerce has taken hold and is on the rise. It’s not just a passing fad – it’s a fact. Previously, you could ignore social media if you wanted to and you’d still be okay (your competitors were probably outpacing you and you were missing out on engaging with a large portion of your customers, but you would have been “okay”). Now, not only is social commerce on the rise, but the transactional side of ecommerce is progressively entering the social sphere.
Social commerce involves adding social sharing buttons to your products to enable your brand advocates and products to reach a wider audience. It’s about brand awareness and creating conversations with customers where your products can solve their problems. Social commerce is creating a more involved, interactive shopping experience.
It’s about integrating the social world with ecommerce, but not so much on the transaction side. As Business Insider revealed last year, “Social commerce is all about inspiration and product discovery." Driving more transactions is an end goal, but the method to do so was to raise brand/product awareness and indirectly drive people back to the site to complete the buying cycle – until this year.
Earlier this year, Twitter got the ball rolling with enough momentum that ecommerce within the social sphere gained more traction. In May, they partnered with Amazon to launch #AmazonCart. This allows people to add products to their Amazon cart without ever leaving Twitter. Yes, they still have to visit Amazon to complete the purchase. However, if you sell your products on Amazon, all they have to do is reply to a tweet containing that Amazon product link with #AmazonCart to add the product to their cart. It makes the interaction easier, more personal, and more direct.
Shortly thereafter, Facebook began beta testing a “Buy” button. It’s still in testing with a small sample of businesses, but the concept takes socially-enabled ecommerce a step further by allowing people to click it and purchase “directly from a business, without leaving Facebook.”
Just last week, Instagram launched Like2Buy, which allows businesses to feature products within their profile. Users can then click on the business’ profile page from a shared photo to see the featured products, select the item they want, and go directly to the business to complete the transaction. Like2Buy also includes a wishlist feature called “My Likes,” allowing customers to aggregate items they like for purchase in the future. The transaction is still completed outside of the social platform.
Even Snapchat has made moves to be more inclusive for ecommerce. Brands have already been using it for social commerce: sharing products, making product announcements, collecting user-generated content for products, etc. They’ve filed two payment-related trademarks and seem to be moving towards implementing a P2P payment processor, similar to the one used by Venmo.
Pinterest has added more features for brands and, in doing so, made it easier for ecommerce companies to use their platform as part of their social commerce strategy. Will we see purchasing capabilities pop up next to pins? Perhaps.
There is no doubt that social commerce is growing and along with it, socially-enabled ecommerce. More and more social users can enter the buying cycle even closer to a completed transaction than ever before; with services like the “Buy” button in testing, the trend is moving toward being able to complete the buying cycle without leaving a social platform. For businesses, the question about social media used to be, “should we?” Today, with ecommerce becoming ever more tightly integrated with social, the answer has become a resounding, “YES,” and the question is, “how?”