How to win in the shifting e-commerce landscape
Social platforms are working hard to become more attractive to e-commerce marketers, by delivering an increasingly frictionless experience of product discovery and purchase.
The landscape is everchanging, with new ads and organic formats constantly being introduced which blur the lines between shopping and socialising.
Beacons of taste in their established niches, the influencer and e-commerce relationship will grow even stronger as users will be exposed to a heightened sense of attainable aspiration — with pricing and information on every product, service or experience they see positioned just a click away.
This kind of interactivity in social media will create a more empowering and satisfying experience than the passive scroll-through of today.
The social feed will become the new shopping mall, driving conversation as well as conversion with users in an ‘always-on’ shopping frame of mind, even if not consciously so.
According to Instagram, there are more than 90 million people already using product tags, with key players such as Pinterest and Snapchat exploring shop now features.
If the path-to-purchase gets reduced further, we may even start seeing certain brands in the near future selling only via social platforms, which could lead the death of the e-commerce site in some verticals altogether.
To win in the e-commerce landscape, brands need to:
Focus on cultivating a strong sense of authenticity and trust with their consumers
We have come a long way since the early days of authenticating e-commerce with yesterday’s newspaper — social feeds have been personalised to such a degree (via algorithmic coding) that the mistrust which once acted as a barrier to purchase has been stripped away.
With the Explore tab on Instagram filling feeds with the brands that users follow and brands the platform thinks that users will like, people are more likely than ever before to be in a shopping mindset while browsing.
More from text-first to visual-first
Brands need to make a fundamental shift in their marketing communications — as product descriptions will be increasingly replaced with video. This marks a significant creative format shift, from the clean, white background of product photography to rich, lifestyle moving image.
The social content of tomorrow is evolving from thumb stopping to thumb shopping — allowing brands to reach their customers in a new, natural and native way.
[Originally published in a Fetch Media Trends Report]
