EasyJet is going to sell flights on Facebook – Paypal integrates into Facebook, it seems companies are discovering the potential of of-site social commerce. Beyond doubt the chances for e-tailers to fish where the fish seem promising big time. A mind-blowing more than 20 million people become fans of fan pages each day – proving there’s no reservation by consumers to communicate and interact with brands on Facebook. The step to actually purchasing items on the social media brand pages and outside their ecommerce stores is a small one and e-tailers and customers will adapt social shopping on Facebook very soon.
The times for e-tailers are good since current growth rate for ecommerce sales is predicted to be almost 13% for 2010 – I’ve got the feeling lots of e-tailers will jump on the bandwagon and sell their stuff on social media platform storefronts. There’s room to grow here. And the growth will come from using interactive, portable storefronts embedded into not just social media but also mobile channels and interactive TV.
But also besides the incredible growth of social networks and corresponding off-site social commerce activities mentioned above there are some noteworthy on-site social commerce as well. Obviously there are richer by functional nature and leave more room for an enhanced user shopping experience.
Social Commerce in general can be very positively defined as the solving of people’s problems and making profit by doing so. More accurately ATG’s Bill Zujewski defines Social Commerce as Social Commerce is about customers having the means to interact with one another in order to make better buying decisions”. However these interactions don’t have to be direct but can come from algorithm driven recommendation engines to (I have put one together myself and I think social commerce should be the umbrella term for describing ecommerce recommendations rather than the ambiguous term Personalisation. In fact recommendations are based on rather social principles namely to look at your peers’ shopping behaviour and compare it with yours).
According to InternetRetailer e-tailers are ready to buy and they have long shopping lists, hence let’s have a look what’s out there.
- Social Shopping: people share the act of online shopping together (synchronous shopping). Besides Facebookmarketing and Facebook Connect you find sites like Kaboodle where one can shop multiple stores together. One neat tool I found is a little toolbar which can make a big difference called ShopTogether by DecisionStep. Amongst other things shoppers can co-browse in real time with friends can interact with each other in a live chat. I like it!
- Ratings & Reviews are around for years and are rather established with a huge impact on sales. Including sponsored reviews from Bloggers by sites like PayPerPost.
- Recommendations & Referrals (mentioned above)
- Forums & Communities: still the ideal case of social commerce. People produce (long tail) content for SEO purposes, connect with each other and share the love for you. Can be reviews, photos, videos anything really.
All of these solution claim to have a very high ROI, it would be interesting what social commerce approach works best for different industries. Ideas?
Happy Easter from London!
Richard, good article. The problem with some of the above social commerce solutions is that they don't integrate directly into the ecommerce experience – they try to change behavior which after 10 years of ecommerce, consumers are less likely to do. What ecommerce needs is a deep integration into social, such that normal commerce functions can be integrated to provide a social element. That's where Social Annex is trying to make a difference. If you'd like to learn more, contact us on our website.
Justin, thanks for stopping by. Are there any implementations of your software to look at?
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I would be remiss not to mention that social commerce is a rapidly evolving space and numerous technologies are emerging to meet new consumer expectations. There are several new technologies that haven't even been given names (e.g. onsite social purchase sharing tools, friendsourced ask-and-answer). Now with the introduction of the Facebook Open Graph API, social commerce technology providers can take advantage of Facebook's 500-million strong user base and exploit social capital of onsite shoppers to increase engagement, reduce abandonment, and ultimately increase conversions. If you are curious about our solution, do our take a look at our website.