Social Commerce

Transcript

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about social commerce strategies.
Hi, Chelsea. I’m sitting here with James and Chelsea today, having a conversation about social commerce. It’s something that a year ago, we weren’t discussing that much. But nowadays, it seems to be a daily topic. It’s moving at such a pace with the likes of Facebook, talking about Facebook payments, it’s a real thing in certain countries, I believe they’ve rolled out in India now. Chelsea, so customers are now starting to talk about it quite a bit as much as their ecommerce store. Some customers, I’d say we’ve got probably two or three clients who have implemented it already. And they’ve got the click through to their existing ecommerce store where it adds it to the shopping cart. And you can actually check out quite easily in a in a couple of clicks. Obviously, the next stage, I think the whole transaction will be within the social media. Where do you see it going? And how quick?
That’s a really good question. And one thing that I’ve definitely noticed is, so the way that Facebook and Instagram work, they update their apps, kind of periodically, and people are getting the new layouts at at different stages. And what I’ve noticed with having some clients, like Instagrams and Facebook’s, kind of like on my phone and attached to like my Instagram app, as soon as their platform changes to the more kind of ecommerce focused one that we’re seeing now, they’re getting in touch with us to talk more about like social commerce. And I also think Facebook’s been really really cheeky as well and put the put the shopping section where the old Activity tab used to be, because obviously, people were used to looking there to see what’s going on in the world. But now they’re clicking on the shopping button. Instead, I think this has the potential to go incredibly, incredibly rapidly. Because if we look at the start of the year when first lockdown was happening, and how quickly ecommerce picks up and social media has, its completely capitalised on it, because look at how quickly they’ve implemented the changes. And they’ve got used to like new consumer behaviour and not even getting used to it. But they’re trying to adapt their platforms to influence that behaviour even further. So I think now is the time to start, start experimenting with it. Because we’re in another lockdown people are there and if you have the functionality as well just go for it.
Yeah. And initially when I saw our thought, or this is just something new, like the marketplace didn’t really take off initially. And then all of a sudden everybody uses it. But having chatted to a client, as soon as they put the products on there, they got conversion straightaway. And the ability to sponsor things in the marketplace. But outside of the marketplace in the commerce section, I think I think we’re always a little bit late to the party, the UK, the US get it beforehand and test it out. And other other countries are tested it and got different versions of it. So definitely Facebook, playing with the layouts, and playing with what the user experience more than anything. I was surprised when I initially saw it when you could click a product, add it to the cart, and it would automatically add it to the cart and e commerce website that we created. We created a WooCommerce website, I clicked one button, it was in the shopping cart ready to checkout. And that was impressive. I assumed that the link would just take you to a product to browse a product. But it does take you to the next level which I find quite impressive.
I think it’s one of those things, isn’t it where if you look, if you’ve got an e commerce Store, and you’re looking at different ways to make more money out of it, it’s just what another piece of the puzzle, which can sort of bring a board bring around that next step change in terms of getting additional traffic to your site that you potentially wouldn’t have got previously. I think when we look at E commerce websites to evaluate them to see how well they’re doing. Yeah, we normally go through the sort of things that people are already familiar with, which is integration with third party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, and all these different things when they come on board for a client tend to move them up to the next level. I think this is just the next evolution of that where integration, integrating with social commerce just gives that extra convenience factor to their own customers so that you can buy straight from the platform’s are already in without even having to go to that person’s website,
which in a lot of ways, it’s another storefront, isn’t it? Yeah,
that’s right. I think a lot of ways it takes away a little bit more of the SEO puzzle as well, because I think yeah, historically, everyone assumed people found products via searching the web, and it’s not necessarily the case. Yeah, like you were saying before, you’ve got the ability to advertise your products and sponsor them into into directly into the feeds of people that are interested in buying, which if you compare that to, to waiting for them to go searching for your product through Google or other search engines, then you’re sort of you’re getting to them before they even know they want to buy
Yeah, definitely. And I think another piece of that puzzle that I saw a picture of him. So Steven Bartlett, the other day Pon put on LinkedIn, an image of ecommerce now being available through WhatsApp, so people are starting to integrate it into their customer service strategies as well. People are getting in touch with them through WhatsApp asking about the products and then it opens up this like storefront, very similar to like the Facebook store and the Instagram store where it’s kind of like a grid and you see two side by side and you can scroll through it. And obviously, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. And that is kind of part of the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Priligy. But it’s just an extra way, I think, to get your products in front of people at a different stage of their customer journey as well. And if you’re, if you’re the kind of someone that has like really good customer service, I definitely try and use it to capitalise on it. Because if you don’t have one product, it’s a really easy way in to kind of offer people suggestions and try and solve their problems with any other products you may have.
It’s like everything’s trying to be rolled into one of them. And in Facebook acquired everybody, everything was very separate and individual. All different apps. Now everything’s integrated Facebook, Instagram, messenger, WhatsApp, and even on your page, you get pop ups at the top all clients do at the minute to push Matt, what’s up was, which was quite a surprise to me, it was initially messenger. And now they’re pushing WhatsApp, there’s a phone number associated with it again, another way of contacting. So yeah, I think it will be rolled out across everything as one kind of unified platform, I can see that being the next step on sooner than I predicted. I thought this would take years to do. But they seem to be doing it quite quick.
And if you look at Facebook business suite, as well, um, it’s something that we’ve been helping clients with helping them get set up on there. They’ve launched like, an integrated platform now between Instagram and Facebook, but also like training sessions as well to like, understand it fully use a bit like the Google ads, training platforms, and also LinkedIn training sessions as well. So I think we’re starting to try to become a big contender, which leads me on to kind of what you were saying earlier, James, and how it’s like another store front, naturally, with social media platforms, they don’t want to take people away from the platform, they don’t want people to have to go out into the shops. And in America, we’ve seen they’ve started integrating it so you can pay directly through the social platforms. So what I’m really interested to see is, how, how far are they going to take it?
Yeah, I mean, my view of that is, I suspect that the ultimate end goal is to replace ecommerce websites altogether. And yeah, I think what you’ll sort of start to see over the coming years is essentially one central place for you to manage your inventory, which then pushes out all these different places. And actually, you’ll do the transaction on each individual website, rather than bringing everything back to your own website, which I think has been a model that has been moving to for a little while anyway. But like you just say, I think it’s been accelerated in the last six months. Yeah, much quicker than anyone really thought. I think, you know, ecommerce has been often touted to been sort of moved on five to 10 years in six months because of the pandemic. I think this is just a symptom of that. But I think yeah, it’s just logical, really, a people actually don’t want lots of different accounts on different websites. And it’s the whole reason that Amazon Prime does so well, because people just don’t want to have to buy through multiple places. Yeah, once you’ve got stored payment details in one platform, why really, why do you want to hand them over to another company as well? And I think we’ve just seen that the facebook, instagram particularly, again, be capitalising on that bandwagon really making sure that yeah, once they’ve got your payment details, you they do much in that one platform as they possibly can. It’s just another way to control you and keep you in the site, basically. But yeah, it is more convenient for the user, if you can buy right there. And then when you you’re seeing the product that you want,
or personally, I’ve always seen, even up to last year, so Facebook and using Instagram as a lead generation tool. So to generate traffic to the website to do a transaction. We already managed quite a few websites. And the website isn’t the main sales source really the websites used as a bit of an aggregator to bring in all the different storefronts like Amazon and eBay, and now social with social commerce as well. Like James says it could potentially drop off the website traffic, the website sales could drop off, but you could benefit massively from using social media. I still personally think it’d be nice to bring them all into a central locations process. So that perhaps it is a website and e commerce website to process all of these different storefronts, but we’re not sure what direction we’re going and how the back end side of things. I have quite a lot of involvement in warehousing order picking, packing and the processing side of it, the actual business side of it after the transaction. And I personally think there needs to be something a little bit more heavy duty than what social media could probably offer to bring all storefronts that one location for you to process as a as a serious ecommerce customer.
Yeah, that’s really interesting and I guess, well with with us not knowing kind of what the regulations are going to bring. It’s interesting to see how far we’ll be in well, what we’ll be talking about in the next six months and how far it’s progressed since then. So yeah, really enjoyed this chat, guys. Thank you. And if you have any questions about social commerce, or just let us know what you think of the new app layouts as well and just get in touch at Hello, so marketing.com