Designing for the next billion users: How videos and social commerce is showing the way!
With the “Jio effect” 📶 bringing millions of Indians online over the last few years, e-commerce companies have been trying to create a bigger market with easy-to-use and intuitive applications. But somehow, that hasn’t been enough.
After interaction with Meesho’s Tier 2 and 3 city users, we found that the bigger problem lies in their fear of technology. Our users feel that they don’t know enough to use new apps well. They have concerns like:
“Kya pata, kuchh galat ho gaya to?🤔 ”
“Yeh button dabaane pe paise katenge kya?💰”
They like staying in their comfort zone, limited to consuming content on TikTok, Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook, instead of having to perform actions on a new app. And this hesitation stems from their limited knowledge of technology 📱 and English 💬. So, it becomes increasingly important for the Product Design team at Meesho to make shopping look fun and easy.
Understanding our users
With some of the research we did in Meesho, we were able to derive a few behavioural traits of our users from this target group:
- Being used to shopping from stores 🛒, they don’t believe in the authenticity of products or brands online 👗, unless they see it or feel it. 65% of the suburban population stated that they lack confidence in online products.
- They know what looks a certain way in photos might actually be different in real life. And 20–30% of all fashion products bought online are returned ↩️️️.
- They don’t know how to use these apps, and also don’t comprehend complex instructions in English. Only 20.26% of the rural population in India knows how to use mobile apps 🙅.
- They love stories! Indians are emotional people, and stories make things feel more real because people can relate to them ❤️.
- Immersive experiences like videos work well for them 🎥. The internet is no longer a luxury, rather it’s a lifestyle now. Online video consumption in India has doubled in the last two years to a whopping 3.7 billion videos per month. In 2016, the percentage of total online video audience in India has increased by 74% i.e. 54 million viewers, with an average Internet user watching 18% more videos.
E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart adhere to a Pull Marketing strategy and pull intent-driven users to the platform, where they can compare prices and buy the products they are looking for 🔍. On the other hand, social commerce brands such as Meesho push products on people’s phones using social media 📲 to increase discovery, thereby lowering customer acquisition costs. This is called Push Marketing.
Drawing user attention on social media in a few seconds to buy a product can be a big pain, and hence it becomes imperative that the product content needs to be engaging and useful ✨.
Social commerce companies are exploiting the increased penetration of internet in tier 2 and 3 cities to enable selling through sharing on social platforms like Whatsapp and Tiktok 👀.
What’s interesting is how India’s nimble micro SMEs are using social channels in creative ways they weren’t necessarily designed for — to drive down their cost of customer acquisition/sales. 93% of social sellers sell on WhatsApp and 51% on Facebook, compared to 21% on a focused e-commerce platform like Flipkart. What’s interesting is how India’s nimble micro SMEs are using social channels in creative ways they weren’t necessarily designed for — to drive down their cost of customer acquisition/sales 🤑 .
How videos can become the game-changer
Videos give a better feel of the product rather than photos! And a statistic courtesy of content marketing agency Tipping Point Labs shows that using a video format:
- improves conversions by up to 85% 🆕,
- 64% people buy products 🛍 after watching brand videos,
- reduces product returns ↩️ by about 25%,
- increases email click through rates by 96% 👆, and
- helps improve SEO 🔎
These also add up to some pretty good financials, don’t you think?
Video can be used to show off a product, share a customer testimonial, or even provide a description of a charitable project.
It doesn’t take much — just a minute or two 🕑. But with that short amount of time, you have the ability to engage a customer with product close-ups and motion in a way that just isn’t possible with photography.
Videos can be used to educate customers
Videos can be used to improve the shopping experience for tier 2 and 3 city users. Since these people have low English fluency, videos can capture a lot more attention ⏯ than a bunch of text any day. Plus, video gives the scope of educating users and demonstrating things in vernacular. Providing a hand-holding experience 👬 to these users at every step of the process makes new users feel like online shopping is their thing.
At Meesho, we have seen a huge improvement in conversions after incorporating a video-first experience for our products. The categories of personal care and home utilities reflected the highest leaps ⬆️ , necessarily because of the fact that videos also help tutor our users with the product usage.
Impact of social influencers with word-of-mouth
With a dramatic change in content consumption behaviour, we are redefining what celebrity 💃 means in Bollywood-mad India, giving more firepower to social-led commerce. New-to-Internet users are leapfrogging TV and consuming almost all their entertainment on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms, giving rise to a new generation of digital celebrities who connect directly with their fans. Since our target users are majorly driven by word of mouth, product videos showing these social influencers endorsing a particular product 💁 helps create trust. Social commerce apps like Simsim and Bulbul use this same model of video-based influencer marketing to sell products, and have turned out to be pretty successful 🌟.
Even though the number of e-commerce or social-commerce platforms are not high among our target groups, channels that have visual offerings of the products create a better sense of authenticity 👍 as compared to channels that don’t, thereby leading to more purchases 🛍 .
Increased sales, reduced returns
A major number of the purchases made online by customers are returned, reason being a difference in colour or quality in the product shown in picture, and the real one 💔. This happens because many suppliers use photo-editing softwares like Photoshop 🎨 to make their products look better than they are. This is prevented in videos, where the product is demonstrated upfront, thereby helping users get a better understanding of it. Since most such companies bear the cost of logistics themselves, reduction in product returns would lead to a huge cut-down in expenditure and increase in profits 📈 .
At Meesho, we have seen a significant drop ⬇️ in the number of returns due to product quality after introducing product videos.
Helping curated commerce with increased engagement
Use of videos instead of product images leads to a significant increase in user engagement 😻. Videos don’t have to be boring all the time, and interesting ways of showcasing products can help in more widespread sharing, like Pinterest does it. 60% users said they click on links sent in commerce category groups to view products 👚, and 44% people forward interesting content from those groups to friends. This increasing product discovery, and makes Push Marketing more successful, helping in further dip in customer acquisition costs.
Videos for live product demos and credibility
Many a times, users have questions around products, but being sceptical, they don’t end up making the purchase. Some social commerce platforms have started conducting live product demos 📹 where people can demo the usage of the product and users can also interact by asking questions about the product being shown.
With the rapid growth in internet usage, it becomes important for us to design for the masses that don’t understand technology 📵. There have been significant changes in data consumption behaviour over the last few years, and new ways of interacting with the users are emerging with the digital revolution ✈️. Videos are just the beginning of it, and it can get smarter with machine learning and AI in the coming future. We need to build products that are more relatable, friendly and conversational. Creating seamless and engaging experiences for the next billion users and on boarding them with the usage of smartphones would definitely become the biggest problem to solve in the coming years.
If you liked this article, do leave your comments 💬 and share your thoughts on this. Because that’s how we grow! 😇
Thank you 👋
Thanks to
for helping with the graphics!Metrics are taken from reports by Forbes, Tipping Point Labs and Nielsen group.
