Social Commerce: What Is It and Why Should It Concern You?
Source: business2community.com
The future of business is on the internet. Most of us are out there shopping online on over a thousand e-commerce sites on the internet for almost everything. There are about 12 million – 24 million e-commerce sites across the entire globe. In other words, pretty much everyone’s trying to get on the online selling trope.
But what is social commerce? It is the ability to purchase products from a third-party seller within the social media platform itself… and no, it’s not a brand new concept.
The retail social commerce sales in the USA were at $19.42 billion and the top leaders in this space, who are helping businesses like yours to be a part of social commerce, are Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. TikTok partnered with Shopify and is going to go all-in on social selling too.
You don’t need really need any statistics to understand why social commerce is going to work wonders. After all, the compulsive human need to use social media and do shopping is well documented.
Let’s look at what social media platforms you can use to sell your products.
Facebook’s social commerce ability has been around for quite a while. Initially, they were geared toward selling products, but now they’re even planning to help you sell your services as well.
The Facebook store comes with tools for promotion, sales, marketing, conversion, customer support, and so much more. If you’re a small or a medium-sized business, you can set up your store on Facebook for free.
Facebook has even partnered with third-party tools. Companies having their Facebook shop can even interact with their customers via the Facebook Messenger app. This will help you offer before and after-sales support to them. Social commerce can make the purchase and sale process super simple and bring about a degree of familiarity between the buyer and the seller.
It’s been revealed by Facebook that about 70% of online shoppers turn to Instagram for discovering products. This is probably the reason why the Instagram shopping feature was rolled out for people to make purchases within Instagram itself.
In Instagram, there are 2 ways to make your product visible for purchase. You can simply tap on a picture and see the tags reveal themselves, showing you how many products you can buy that are displayed in that picture. Alternatively, you can swipe on Instagram stories and you’ll occasionally come across a story that will ask you to swipe up to shop now.
With Instagram launching a chargeable in-app checkout feature, it’s clear that they’re gearing towards making social commerce.
Pinterest rolled out the option for buyable pins in 2015. There were only 30 million of those when it first came, but within 3 months, the number doubled to 60 million.
But what’s even crazier? The average order value on Pinterest is $50, which is the highest among all other social networks.
Pinterest is associated with various popular retailers. Another unique aspect of Pinterest is that only a small portion of the site’s content is original. The rest of its content is “repins”. As an original content creator, this is a great opportunity for you, and since the entire platform is filled with visuals. Surely you’d know by now how important it is to invest in the pictures and videos of your product, right?