Social Media is a Terrible Ecommerce Tactic — or is it?

Vikram Singh Bisen
VSINGHBISEN
Published in
3 min readJul 30, 2019

Social Media has become most popular source for converting online audience traffic into a real customer. How far it’s true? Online shopping is rising rapidly across the globe, especially in developing countries fuelling eCommerce business with shocking results in every segment.

But truly, social media is not a significant source for driving online traffic directly to the eCommerce website or it fails to convert them for buying products from there.

Social media manage to generate less than 2% of entire eCommerce traffic and conversion rate is also below 1%. All these statistics apparently shows that “Social Media is a Terrible Ecommerce Tactic”.

It’s clear now that participation of social media in generating online traffic for eCommerce website is over-advertised and used as a major recourse for eCommerce websites. Hence, what are the other channels people using to visit at these retail websites is not viable to find out?

Is Social Media helpful for Ecommerce Marketing?

Marketing and social media both are instinctively obsessive sources of online traffic conversion tool, instead of contributory. As per the research, spoken recommendations help to take more than 80% purchase decisions.

And some of them also come through social media with the name and brand mentions drawing searches and web pages that are linked in the documents.

Nevertheless, social media marketing services is not playing any major role in attracting desirable consumers. And it can be practically proved by an example of role of social to create awareness and reputation among acquaintances.

As per the human tendency if someone takes advice of his friend/relative to buy certain thing, most probably he will recommend the best service provider he has used, and this could be a decision making factor for that person.

And as per the new trend, you will search online and buy it which means whole credit goes to direct channel of recommendations. Similarly, if you get the feedback form other and Google it before buying, what it should be considered — a spoken recommendation or visit from search.

New research and studies shows that social media has not any major role to make purchase decisions; instead it helps in building awareness among audience with some social impacts.

In fact, all the online activities studied by the search engine, social media is the second major source (after pay per clicks ads) for making consumers average purchase decisions.

Sequencing could be the Main Problem

People addicted with social networking kill their spare time or browse as a regular practice to avoid such interruptions like opening such links especially that point of time.

They don’t want to disturb their comfort instead they remember the deals and offers in their mind and visit later when they are in such disposition to take action on such deals.

This kind of action concluded as a website visit through direct sources without any credit goes to the social networking sites.

In the context of the same, the research shows that, social media is not playing a lead role in revenue generation, especially as an eCommerce online marketing tactic.

But it is not true, because the post and sharing on these social platforms are contributing somewhere to drive traffic on eCommerce, considering that we devote more time on social media compare to web.

Topic Tending: Social Media and Digital Platforms: Business Opportunities for Us

This terrible eCommerce tactic is indicating that website owners should use more concrete tools and conversion computers like Google analytics to better comprehend the insights of the funnel and the eternally complex relationship between the role of digital marketing and offline promotions.

And it also depends on the perception of marketers and their activities, but social media optimization will remain the leading eCommerce tactic to generate traffic at low cost.

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Vikram Singh Bisen
VSINGHBISEN

Content Writer | Stock Market Analyst | Author & News Editor at The Telegraph Daily