Social Media has become the most important tool to drive the business in the last few years. While the Social commerce drives only 2% of the retail sales by now, it has the potential to drive the market effectively in the coming years.
With the sales patterns going diverse and publishers using different online techniques to attract buyers, the Social Commerce is well on course to become the best what the retailers want. The signs have been good while the execution needs to be better for the social commerce to excel well in the industry.
Social Media platforms serve to the people in the capacity of product recommendations, reviews as well as by the retailers to connect to the brand-focused people who make sure that the product is well categorized and best in the business. Any review or recommendation is taken seriously to reach out to the potential buyer. As per estimates made by Technavio, the annual social commerce might exceed $165 billion by 2021 and that is only three years from now.
The signs for 2018 are bright and here are the tools which can drive the market for social commerce in the coming years –
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is an all-embracing e-commerce platform which offers us in-built selling and publishing on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. It has that unique ability to synchronize the product inventory across all social media platforms if you do not want to worry about inventory or fulfillment issues. In shorter words, this is an easy multichannel social commerce platform which has the capability to generate buy-ins for your business.
To use this tool, you will have to add your Facebook store to your business page in order to showcase the entire catalog automatically in the Newsfeed of the user. You can also create Buyable Pins for the users to pin and buy the products directly on Pinterest as well as use the BigCommerce catalog to tag your products in the shoppable Instagram posts.
Amazon Spark
Amazon has released its Amazon Spark Initiative in July 2017 which is a social feed of user-posted image that lives within its shopping application. In other ventures, it can be attributed to being similar to other image-heavy networks like Instagram and Pinterest. As of now, only its Prime members can post and comment on Spark which can be viewed by any customer but only the prime members can interact with the comment. This is because Spark Content is focused on engaging active shoppers. 80 million members spend an average $600 more per year than the non-prime members.
Though the marketers are not able to post images on the platform yet, they can work with the influencers who are authorized by the Amazon Prime.
Beetailer
Beetailer is one of those emerging platforms created specifically to increase social commerce. It is a platform which helps in integrating your existing web store into Facebook. You have that unique discretion to customize the product selection in order to only show a subset of your inventory or you can also create multiple tabs on your Facebook page for different sections of the shop.
This tool is a big help when you want to promote your online store with ads as well as analytics. This can help you analyze the performance of your products over time with your audience. There is also product-specific comment thread powered by Facebook in order to promote your Facebook commerce presence.
WeChat was first introduced as a subsidiary to counter WhatsApp’s surge and it became an instant hit China with user-responsive chat feeds. Introduced in the year 2011, the application has more than 800 million monthly user base and which has transformed China’s digital habits, with the average user spending 70 minutes per day on it.
Now, this is a business opportunity because it has user-interface of all social networks like- WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram and has an integrated digital wallet system that people can use to order taxis, recharge their phones, food deliveries, bill payments as well as pay various retailers. The Research shows that 31 percent of the users started their retail purchase on WeChat which is roughly 200 percent from previous year.
Messenger Bots
Messenger Bots are useful tools which help you connect with your customers on Facebook Messenger, a platform already used by FB to interact with the brands, publishers and influencers etc. the Platform has more than 1.2 Billion monthly user base and is a dream platform for various publishers and Marketers. Roughly all your consumers have a presence on this platform and which makes this an exciting prospect.