S-Commerce: How Social Shopping Is the Gift that Keeps Giving

With mother’s day around the corner, many online retailers are looking for new ways to expose their products to a wider audience. Online retail shopping has grown to become a $250 billion dollar business, and continues to grow as new consumer oriented e-commerce platforms are developed. Retailers now have many opportunities to showcase their products beyond their traditional e-commerce website.  Social shopping, or S-commerce has become the latest trend for online retail shopping. While still growing in popularity, social shopping is proving to be one of the best mediums for retailers to increase exposure and conversions. Here are the recent developments in social sharing networks, and how they can benefit your business.

New Arrivals

Currently the biggest trend in social commerce is curation sites The websites allow users to create profiles and then save, share, and purchase items of their choice.  While the idea is similar to pinterest in theory, users are giving the option to buy straight from a retailers e-commerce site. The social aspect of sharing and following is still incorporated with these sites, but the focus is bypassing traditional advertising by driving the users straight to the cart. The social curation site Polyvore currently makes up 20% of all s-commerce, only second to Facebook. The newbie curation site Wanelo is currently the number one lifestyle app in the I-Tunes store. These sites allow for free product listings, and can be a great source of referral traffic to your e-commerce store.

The Classics

Popular social media and e-commerce stores have caught on the rise of curated social shopping, and are changing to accommodate this growing trend.  E-commerce giant, Amazon quietly rolled out “Amazon Collections”. Which is an image heavy, pinterest inspired site where users can share create boards of products, and buy directly from the amazon store. In an opposite move, social media staple Pinterest has incorporated e-commerce into its curation structure.  Because of the unreliability of pinners to provide complete purchasing information, the social network has introduced Pinterest Gifts. This is a section of the site in which all pins are required to have a price and a website URL. Once again these listing are free, and can be an easy win for e-commerce retailers.

Coming Soon

It is no secret that twitter has been brainstorming ways to monetize the site, outside of its current ad structure. Despite the popularity of the site, it has yet to become as profitable as rival social network Facebook. Blueprints were leaked earlier this year from twitter containing a new a “buy” button. Tweets would be shown with a product image, price, and description. The buy feature would then take you directly to the corresponding e-commerce site. While still in development, given the massive twitter following, this could be a great opportunity to push select products to targeted audiences.

At EmoryDay we specialize in creating and marketing e-commerce stores. We can optimize your existing website through creative and results driven marketing strategies. Contact us today to see how we can help build your ecommerce business.