Leveraging User Generated Content (UGC)
User Generated Content (UGC) is not new and is a pretty self-explanatory term. In fact, this post is an example of UGC. Companies have leveraged UGC in various ways to enhance their product and the world has quickly moved from seeing UGC as an innovative idea to facing a glut of UGC. The question now is, how does one decide what kind of UGC is good for their product?
In my mind, there are three lenses through which one could evaluate UGC for product fit. Note: In this post, I will limit the discussion to UGC for product focused use cases and not consider UGC for use cases in aligned activities such as marketing or customer service.
Impact on Serviceable Available Market (SAM)
Serviceable Available Market is defined as the part of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) that can actually be reached by the product (wiki). One’s choice of UGC can fundamentally change the nature of the product, thereby impacting its SAM. For example, eBay allows all kinds of HTML and Javascript in its item descriptions (example here); this makes sellers feel more in control and has historically helped eBay on-board sellers across multiple categories much faster, thereby expanding its SAM.
However, as online shopping has moved closer to retail standard, these differently structured descriptions for different items have led to a bad buyer experience. It is akin to navigating a flea market. While this experience still makes eBay feel like home to a certain segment of buyers, it severely limits its SAM because many buyers (especially millennials) are not comfortable with this user experience.
Alignment with the product and brand philosophy
The best way to explain this is to look at the contrasting levels of UGC on three e-commerce platforms: Amazon, eBay and Poshmark. Amazon behaves like a true retailer and makes sellers link their items to a product in Amazon’s catalog. The description for any given product in its catalog is user generated, with Amazon doing the final curation. This leads to a clean and consistent item description, resulting in a standardized buyer experience. eBay on the other hand was conceived as a true marketplace, designed to make any transaction feel more like a buyer-seller transaction than a buyer-eBay transaction. This led to it allowing all kinds of product descriptions, an example of which was shown above. Poshmark is a social e-commerce marketplace and therefore, it shows a range of buyer-seller chat content, from offers to emojis, on the listing page. It allows this content because it believes that this makes buyers feel part of a community and builds repeat purchase relationships. Something like this would be unthinkable for Amazon because retailers live and breathe standardization and elimination of distraction.
Fit with the scale of the platform and the nature of its offerings
In the world of e-commerce, UGC is integral to the product and plays a key role at various points in the conversion funnel. However, what kind of UGC would work depends on the scale of the platform and the nature of its offerings. For example, user generated buying guides (example: this buying guide on antiques) are an amazing tool for platforms that sell items that involve significant upfront research from the buyer. Having good guides increases the probability that the buyer will buy from the platform whose guide he/ she read. Similarly, user generated collections (example: this collection on plush), which are a prominent part of eBay’s home page and are based on one’s search history, are great but only if the platform has enough breadth and depth of inventory across categories to be able to justify such prime real estate for them. They increase the probability of the buyer seeing something exciting enough that he/ she will buy it.
In contrast, Customer reviews, which generally are an awesome piece of UGC, could be a big problem for a mass platform trying to get into a niche category. Given it’s mass buyer base, platform’s niche items are likely to get bad or no reviews, which its buyers are trained to treat as a sign that an item is not worth buying. This could lead to such items getting into a vicious cycle that inhibits their future sale. Eventual result will be that the sellers in niche categories that the platform might have courted with a lot of effort will move elsewhere and the platform will be unable to diversify. To appreciate this scenario, think about why niche stuff sells so well on eBay. eBay buyers are trained to trust and experiment and not to rely on customer reviews because there weren’t any customer reviews on eBay till early this year! So, the choice of not having that critical piece of UGC (i.e. customer reviews) did work to reinforce eBay’s niche fabric.
Overall, while UGC is great, the decision on what kind of UGC to leverage is not straightforward. UGC can be immensely powerful as long as you leverage the right one and carefully harness it.
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