The future of Social Shopping
I was asked to contribute to an article about social shopping for a news publication…it didn’t get used so I thought I’d share.
‘In the not too distant future, we will no longer differentiate between social shopping and online shopping. The World Wide Web, at its very conception, was created to facilitate the sharing and linking of academic documents through hypertext. Social media ultimately fulfilled the same role albeit for multimedia content and conversations. But whereas Social was, until very recently a channel, it has now become a feature that is integral to any online experience. Social functionalities such as voting up, liking, sharing and commenting are omnipresent across all forms of content and environments whilst social media networks have evolved to stream live t.v shows and publish editions of 3rd party content.
This convergence is only set to accelerate. In the US, 1 in every 4 minutes spent online on mobile devices is spent in social networks or messenger apps dwarfing other categories of apps including video, music, retail and search which accounts for less than 5 seconds. In this context social shopping will be central to the evolution of commerce but it won’t be the social aspects of the experience that will truly transform and propel the shopping experience.
Messenger apps have been around for ages — Remember AIM or MSN Messenger? — but it is bots and AI that have allowed for many tasks (including selling) to be done at scale on such platforms. Voice activation which will no doubt be integrated into social channels has transformed any room with a voice enabled device into a virtual shopping basket. And the Virtual reality arms race that currently grips all the key technology players will turn every space into a showroom. It’s the players that embrace these technologies, whether social or otherwise that will thrive.’
