How New App, “Down to Shop,” Brings Entertainment, Shopping, & Social Media Together
While ads might’ve found their place, commerce is hardly native to social media. Despite efforts made to blend commerce with social media through the addition of shopping tags and shoppable stories, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat often fail to provide a place where customers make their final purchases.
Perhaps the problem lay in social media’s general approach towards commerce to begin with. While users often know they’re being advertised to on social media, they’re not always logging onto these platforms to specifically shop. Discover — very often so, but not always shop.
But, what if social media changed things up by making the experience about shopping first instead of socializing? What if a social media platform merged shopping with entertainment and then, from there, blended it all into a social experience?
That’s exactly the approach, Down To Shop (DTS) — the new social media app — takes by integrating online shopping, entertainment, and social media into one experience.
Here’s how it works
In a direct approach to the commerce model, DTS releases a new episode every day where one of the show’s characters feature a specific internet product in a sort of self-aware infomercial style.
Each sketch pokes fun at shopping networks, like QVC, and traditional infomercials because, first and foremost, the platform is about entertaining. And, let’s be honest, traditional infomercial advertising provides a lot of material to make fun of.
According to co-founder, Cyrus Summerlin, DTS “entertains people into making a purchase.” How? By putting quality content and entertainment first and advertising second.
Here’s why DTS is so special
In the process of entertaining, DTS fills another need commonly realized through social media — discovery. For many users, DTS provides a great way to discover the coolest items on the internet while getting in a good laugh at the same time.
DTS casts aside the model of flooding the viewer with boring product specs. Instead, the app entertains viewers with the products. With DTS, content about products no longer becomes the interruption. It becomes what people want to see.
DTS also deserves attention because it takes advertising — something many people are sick of seeing on social media — and makes it funny and entertaining. Think of all the funny, interesting, and entertaining videos people share that go viral. DTS essentially creates videos with those three attributes and then gives people easy and highly social ways to share the content. And, what’s more, DTS rewards users for doing just that — sharing.
Where does DTS leave us?
So far, QVC, Facebook, and Amazon have all tried to meld online and social shopping. In each case, these companies achieved limited success. For everyone, even Amazon, shopping through social media is still a new and vastly uncharted territory. The rules, limits, and possibilities shift almost daily.
For its own part, Amazon continues to prove itself as a great choice for hunt-and-peck shopping. And, when it comes to browsing and create-your-own-adventure shopping, physical retail wins in many cases, as evidenced by the resurgence of shopping malls as popular ways to shop for Gen Z — a generation that consistently demonstrates a partiality towards browsing, whether online or in brick-and-mortar locations.
That being said, DTS challenges the status-quo by trying a new approach towards social shopping and e-commerce.
In the process, DTS asks the question, “Is there still room to compete with and disrupt existing models of e-commerce and social shopping?
There’s only one way to find out: give it a try.
With so many users proving the value of social media for discovery, socializing, building brand loyalty, and shopping, brands don’t need to look far for reasons to experiment with new social shopping experiences like DTS.
So, How can brands capitalize on the opportunities offered by emerging platforms like DTS?
- Get in early. Jump into new platforms without hesitation and give it a try!
- Get creative. Walk outside of the lines and rules considered typical to your brand. Perfection will get in the way of breakthrough, especially on these new mediums.
- Test small-batch products or other low-risk investments. Think your brand is too big? Use small-batch products or offshoots to minimize risk and increase speed.
- Measure success. Considering easy-to-track metrics, like number of users, is important, but patience is more important than anything. New platforms can take time to catch on.
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The above piece was written by Connor Beck in collaboration with Carter Jensen and the Latitude research team.
Resources and original reporting of the above points covered by the following publications — Cheddar, PSFK, Tech Crunch, and Youtube
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