Transition from eCommerce to Social Commerce

Businesses operating in the dynamic environment need to be vigilant about the current trends of the market. They need to be acquainted with market trends to adopt new communication channels for revenue a generation that promises growth.

The social networking channel is one of the latest fads that is inflicting among customers of every segment. Customers are using this communication channel not only for socializing and increasing their social circle but also for researching products online before purchasing. Among such customers who are using social networking media, at least half of those publish reviews and post comments about the products they buy.

Utilizing this communication media to develop an ecosystem for retailers nurtures new course of revenues. This is also true for different platform vendors who are providing such solutions to enable social commerce.

This social media enable online retailers to exploit social capital and helps in extracting tremendous word-of-mouth publicity of fans who like the products, make purchases and share about it with their friends. Now there are several ways to pull the power of social networking media and social commerce.

1)   Rating & Reviews: This system of rating & writing reviews on social sites is a decade old practice. Acknowledging that the friends’ recommendation scores more than any other criterion for influencing the buying behavior, companies like Amazon integrated reviews & ratings to their sites paving a way of substantial growth.

There are two aspects which the online retailers need to consider. Firstly, customers rely heavily on researching about the products which they are going to buy and look out for any such kind of reviews on the retailers’ site from first hand users & experts.

Secondly, the online retailers should utilize the user generated content on their site as a successful social commerce strategy. Search engines give preference to those sites which posts new content on a regular basis.

2)   Social Logins: According a report by Forrester, approximately 25% of the online shoppers abandon their shopping cart at the checkout stage if they need to fill the traditional registration form for creating an account.

For online retailers, account information is necessary as they learn more about shopping pattern or to offer them promotional discounts so as to retain & develop a relationship. But online shoppers are averse in filling out such lengthy registration forms. Moreover, most of the customers fill inaccurate information.

To tackle such issues, a feasible option is opting for social logins. Social logins means login through IDs created on social sites like Facebook, Google etc. It reduces the time spent on registration as it fetches required information from such logins. This ultimately reduces the abandonment of shopping carts by expediting the registration process.

3)   Social Sharing: It monitors the recommendations of the fellows for driving qualified traffic to the product pages on the ecommerce sites. This kind of arrangement leverages social advocacy about the purchases made by the customers or their product reviews to their friends on multiple social networks.

It also helps retailers in avoiding the news feed optimization. Social networking sites like Facebook, etc. are designed to promote the significance by preferring news feed posts from friends who interact frequently. News feed posts that customers write are likely to get higher rank in the news feed than those from the brand.

Social commerce has become mandatory in today’s market. The only need is to develop deep analytic& using this channel as a complementary vertical only.

Point of Sale System - Retail PRO eCommerce Integration