 We are living in strange times. Technology is changing our lives at unprecedented rates and is offering opportunities we could only dream about 30 years ago. Maybe this extreme pace is one of the reasons why we like to dwell in memories of the past. One particular decade many of us like to think back to and that is influencing our lives again is the 90s. Especially the younger generations like not only to dress like the 90s but to shop like they are in the 90s. Do you remember the hay-day of QVC and HSE 24? Live TV-Shopping is back! At least somewhat and with a significant technological spin on it. Of course we are not watching TV anymore, we are watching livestreams on social media!
China is the trailblazer once again and for two years now, Chinese companies, influencers and everyone else who has something to offer is using livestreams to advertise their own products. Even the Chinese government has voiced its support, calling the industry the "new engine" of e-commerce growth. With China leading the way, the US are of course the next in line following this footsteps. With "NTWRK" a new player is entering the livestream market: "Our goal is to become a massive marketplace". NTWRK is combining the power of engaging content and the influencers creating it, with desirable and exclusive products. Those products are limited in number and availability time frame, increasing their desirability and leading to high velocity in transactions. Those opportunities did not go unnoticed by the big players in the social commerce market. Amazon has a streaming platform, which hosts daily live shows on fitness, makeup, cooking etc. The hosts are talking about certain topics and matching products are shown directly below the video. Easy to access, easy to purchase. With its "Shops" feature Facebook is going down a similar route. They are making it easier to shop for products in real time. Sellers, brands and creators will be able to tag products from their Facebook Shop or catalog before going live and those products will be shown at the bottom of the video so people can easily tap to learn more and purchase. As live-streaming becomes more popular it will be only a matter of time until more platforms will be offering similar product integrations into their streaming possibilities. Stay cmmrcl.ly impactful! Social commerce is quite a popular term, with a lot of varying angles and perspectives. Loosely defined it is the digital selling of products utilizing social media like features (e.g. for product discovery and experience). This plurality of perspectives culminates in as many approaches to social commerce. The underlying premise is what they all have in common: Leverage our changing behaviour patterns for improved and immersive commerce solutions.
On the forefront are the big social media platforms (like Facebook or Snapchat), which are already great at letting users discover and experience products. With features like dynamic product ads or in app checkouts they are constantly improving their own on-platform and off-platform commerce offering. Then we have players like Verishop. They are building a marketplace, but to improve the experience they are adding features like feeds and are hence adopting a more social media like look and feel. Shopify, one of the leading providers of e-commerce software, is actively encouraging its customers to experiment with social commerce, as this is a great way to connect with and sell to customers. Walmart, another major retail player, is taking this approach to the next level. They are not just thinking about how they can utilize social media platforms, but are exploring a potential purchase of TikTok US. Effectively becoming a major social commerce player themselves. They even renewed their interest after their initial bid, which was jointly with Microsoft, was rejected by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. Those are just some examples of the many approaches to social commerce. We compiled some articles below, in case you want to dive deeper. Facebook is making it easier to shop and sell within its apps Facebook just took the next step to becoming more of a digital mall. After Instagram Shops, Facebook is now announcing the expansion to Facebook Shops. The Shop is aimed to be a new place to discover businesses and shop for products in the Facebook/Instagram app. Businesses can easily set up their own store and showcase their products. While Facebook is getting the Shops starter kit, Instagram will go into the next phase. With Checkout it will enable users to make a purchase in just a few taps. All of this happens without actually leaving the app. Snapchat’s ‘dynamic ads’ product for e-commerce retailers rolls out worldwide With it's latest ad product launch, Dynamic Ads, Snapchat is also delving deeper into social commerce. This ad product allows advertisers to automatically create ads in real time using the brands own product catalog. As known from other platforms, advertisers don’t have to spend time manually creating their advertisement to fit Snapchat’s vertical format, but instead, sync their product catalog with the social platform and allow Snap to build their ads in real time. Early results of this new format have been very promising, with advertisers seeing significant ROAS increases. Verifshop adopts a social network strategy from China Looking at digital commerce and an effective omni-channel approach, social media platforms are a natural next step. Instagram, Pinterest or Snapchat are constantly working on ways to improve the shopping experience for its users. Verishop however is entering the social commerce sphere the other way around. It is an e-commerce site that specifically offers social elements like a personalized feed to let it's user have a social shopping experience. This approach is not new and has led to great success for dominating Chinese e-commerce players like Alibaba. How social commerce is enabling retailers to be part of their customers’ life Social commerce is the perfect opportunity for retailers of all stripes to dive in, experiment with social shopping, and emerge ahead of the curve. The ability to showcase the brand and products exactly where people spend much of their time to discover things they are interested in, is combined with fast and easy purchasing flows making social commerce a great place to combine product discovery and sales. What a Walmart-Microsoft bid for TikTok could mean for e-commerce The potential (forced) sale or technology partnership of TikTok’s US operations to or with a local partner has dominated the tech headlines for the past weeks. One of the more interesting suitors is Walmart. While this sounds strange initially, there are solid business reasons behind it. The retail landscape has shifted dramatically and Walmart's move is just the latest in a string of maneuvers in which retailers try to adjust their ways of selling products in the digital world. On top of the direct path to the customer, transaction data is the other big asset of owning a social media platform. While it currently needs to be shared with Facebook or Google, a world where Walmart is able to effectively reach and serve its customers through an omni-channel approach as well as provide a viable platform for its third party brands to advertise on, opens a whole new set of opportunities. Stay cmmrcl.ly impactful!  When browsing through our page, you quickly realize: cmmrcl.ly is a bunch of people who like bright colors as well as c's and m's. While this might be correctly observed, this is just a scratch on the surface with much more underneath!
cmmrcl.ly? Founded in the heart of St. Pauli/Hamburg we could not imagine a better place to embody our values. We are not about the fancy and superficial. We are about hard work, great products, partnerships and above all generating real results! Those are the things that truly matter to us! What we do is help advertisers to benefit from a highly dynamic, rapidly accelerating social commerce sphere. Social commerce? Social commerce is at the heart of intersecting fundamental changes within our behavior as consumers. On one hand the brick-and-mortar businesses erode and sales shift more and more towards digital channels. On the other hand we have a drastic change in media consumption with all of us spending more of our free time on social media platforms than ever before. These changes have not gone by unnoticed by those platforms and they are evolving how we discover and shop for brands: Instagram is a digital mall offering the full spectrum from on-platform storefront to in-app checkout allowing an immersive, seamless shopping experience! Social commerce with cmmrcl.ly? These changes in our purchase behaviour force businesses to rethink their sales channels and processes. This transition is where we help with our knowledge and product offering. We help you to realise incremental sales from social commerce and orchestrate these with all other sales channels. Putting our money where our nordish months are, we will align all your sales channels and deliver result-based advertising measures along your ROI targets across Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, Google and the programmatic world! The upcoming decade offers enticing new opportunities and we are already excited about helping our clients take advantage of them! Stay cmmrcl.ly impactful! |
AuthorrWelcome to our blog! We are happy you found your way to us. Within this space we are covering all things social commerce: From current trends to new features, talking about everything that excites us! Archive
February 2021
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