CURATED SOCIAL COMMERCE: WHAT ZUMBA COULD LEARN FROM BRAZILIAN RETAIL GIANT MAGAZINE LUIZA (VIDEO)

March 7, 2013

Looking for social commerce inspiration?  Here’s an interesting initiative from Magazine Luiza, Brazil’s4th largest retailer , that builds on the curated commerce trend.

Last year and bucking the trend of bringing social to the store, Magazine Luiza brought the store to social, by inviting people to curate their own mini-store on Orkut and Facebook.

The ‘Your Store’ (Magazine Você) initiative invited consumers to stock their own mini-store with up to 60 items from Magazine Luiza’s inventory.  Users could personalise the store, offer personal reviews and comments, and get 2.5% – 4.5% commission for any sales made.  Fulfilment and logistics was handled by Magazine Luiza.

Contagious Magazine reports that whilst the idea was popular – 53,000 stores were opened, and whilst conversion rates were 40% higher than traditional stores, only a total of 10,000 products were sold.

Whilst this could be seen as another nail in the coffin of the ‘bring the store to social’ variant of social commerce, we think it points to an opportunity.

How about if the idea was tweaked – a la OpenSky – to offer member organisations/certification bodies for independent professionals a simple solution for their members  (Think personal trainers, caterers,  yoga/Zumba instructors, photographers, hairdressers, educators). Self-employed professionals depend on, and use their social networks and followers to build their businesses, so there would be a natural fit for curated store on a blog, linked from YouTube, or even Facebook.

If you’ve ever been to a Zumba instructor event, you’ll see why this would work.  Instructors buying sack loads of Zumba gear to sell to their members.  It’d be a useful benefit from the Zumba Instructor Network if they could do this without having to manhandle the gear themselves – and it’d keep member dues coming in.

As the science of promotions shows, the key to success will, of course, be to run any such store with two-sided promotions, both the curator and customer should get a better price than can be found elsewhere. Otherwise the idea is dead in the water.  But done right, here’s a real opportunity in the social commerce space.

 

Thanks to social commerce today.

Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

2013: THE YEAR OF SHOPPABLE VIDEO?

March 6, 2013

What do Gucci, Juicy Couture, Neiman Marcus, Barney’s, SSense, Target, ASOS, HomeBase, and The Sanctuary Spa have in common? They are all early adopters of shoppable videos, now an integrated part of YouTube functionality. Click on an item of furniture, apparel or cosmetics in a YouTube video and an embedded hot link takes you to a product page, or puts the item in a browsing basket to look at later.

These shoppable videos are a tantalising glimpse of the future of social commerce. Beyond social commerce, we believe shoppable video represents the future of advertising and product placement and we think we’ll see a whole lot more of shoppable video in 2013. At WPP digital agency group Syzygy, we’ve worked up the shoppable video into a concept app, codenamed GOAB (see video below).

Imagine this. You’re watching the latest Bond movie, Skyfall; you touch (or old skool – click) Daniel Craig’s Tom Ford suit and the suit is placed into your personal smart locker for you to view, customise and buy later. Or better still, when you see something you like in a movie, you tap your (dimmed) smartphone screen (or use gesture-control connectivity with the smartphone app) – and second screen simultaneous streaming technology captures a screenshot, with hotspots over products linking to product pages. Same goes for ads; tap or gesture to add the product to your shopping list – simple, non-invasive and useful. Checkout how movie theatres are rolling out in-theatre digital services for the hard of hearing or visually impaired. A tweak of this technology could enable a shopping stream along with movies.

So you heard it here first: 2013 will be the year of the shoppable video in social commerce and beyond. It won’t be perfect; mere Platonic shadows of what is to come. We’ll have to crack the nut of intentionality for starters – people watch video for entertainment, not to shop – but we’ve been dealing with this intentionality disconnect for years with social commerce – and we have some solutions. But expect big advertising groups to be all over shoppable video like a rash. The digital convergence of advertising begins with the shoppable video. Watch this space.

Thanks to http://socialcommercetoday.com/2013-the-year-of-the-shoppable-video/

Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Social Commerce: $30B over the next 5 years

February 27, 2012

In an unsurprising twist, young male audiences with mid to higher disposable incomes are more comfortable providing their credit card details to a social network. The infographic below is based on some research commissioned by Digitas last month that helps shape the context of who is interested in social commerce, and looks at a forecast of where the revenue might head over the next 5 years.

While the Booz & Co report suggests a nice neat $30B expenditure figure within the United States, I’d suggest that social commerce is going to become extraordinarily difficult to measure in the coming years. The reason for this is simple – social commerce is quickly being integrated into every ecommerce site, blurring the lines between money spent on social networks, and money spent on what are traditionally considered to be ‘ecommerce’ only.

Take for example the likes of fab.com (which I’ve previously written about), Fancy , and even the rumoured future of Pinterest, which by the way, with up to 80% female audience, counteracts the male-skew that the infographic below suggests. Each example are standalone sites that are creating their own unique interests graph and attempting to turn them into direct ecommerce transactions. EBay bought Hunch.com last year in order to generate more socialised predictions of what consumers wanted to buy, based on an interrogation of their interest graph. A number of fashion brands trialled social commerce on their branded retail sites dating back as early as 2010, when they would try and match recommendations of clothing to other people like you who were browsing their store. Let’s also not forget about Amazon, who for years have had their basic recommendation algorithm suggesting products you should buy based on the behaviours of others within their shopfront.

They’re all legitimate forms of social commerce in one way or another, some more basic than others. Yet none of them would be considered a social media platform in the way that the Booz & Co report has tackled the problem.

So is $30 billion an accurate figure? I’m not sure it’s even close. I doubt if anyone selling things online in 5 years will be doing so without some methodology of tapping into a social graph – either by integrating into the API of one or more of the big social networks, or by creating their own internalised social graph on a standalone website. Add into that mix the mobile factor (mobile commerce will add to the social experience), and just about anything we buy with our disposable income will be traced back to a recommendation that someone, somewhere, sometime recently gave us.

Thanks to : http://deliriantistiromani.wordpress.com/
Related articles

2 Comments | Application Hosting, Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Cross Channel Commerce Paradigm.

February 6, 2012

With mobile and social quickly emerging as the new consumer focal points, retailers need to fully understand these channels to develop a cross-channel strategy that maximizes the strengths and potential ROI of both. The previous two Convergent Commerce Series articles, Cross-Channel Plan for Mobile Engagement and The Optimized Mobile User Experience, discussed the need for a cross-channel retail strategy that incorporates online, mobile, brick and mortar and social, and how to successfully implement a mobile channel that holds as the backbone for this new commerce paradigm. Integrating social into the cross-channel commerce strategy does raise some interesting questions: Will consumers utilize Share to Facebook and Twitter from mobile devices? Is there a relationship between frequency of engagement with retailers and the likelihood of following them on a social outlet? Finally, are converted fans then more likely to further interact with the brand by, say, downloading the retailer’s smartphone app?

As Facebook and Twitter gain incredible popularity, social media is increasingly becoming a popular medium for commerce. Last year, Twitter announced that it had 175 million registered users while Facebook currently boasts of more than 800 million active users — all of which fundamentally joined because they are interested in what their friends and family have to share. People spend over 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, continually posting status updates, checking-in to a location and sharing information seen or heard, and retail commerce is no exception to this.

Since social plug-ins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new web sites integrate with Facebook every day and over 500 million users engage with Facebook monthly through these external web sites. Because there are currently over 350 million users that access Facebook through their mobile phones ― and people who access Facebook through their mobile devices are twice as active as non-mobile users ― retailers should have a Share to Facebook and Twitter functionality on their mobile optimized web sites and rich apps.

By enabling social integration (Share to Facebook, Twitter and Email) in their mobile optimized web site and rich app, a retailer allows customers to share products and services immediately with their entire social network. Consumers who need feedback right away, perhaps looking for that second, third or even tenth opinion on a last minute gift for a friend, are the perfect use cases for social integration into the mobile commerce experience. The ability to share ideas from social to mobile in real-time is imperative for consumers on the go and in the retail store.

From a retailer’s standpoint, social network integration is a great marketing tactic; it is free brand advocacy and gets 130 impressions on average per consumer per post. Like ratings and reviews, it allows retailers to gain valuable market intelligence to further develop a personalized relationship with the consumer. Retailers should interact with their customers through these channels by monitoring and responding to Twitter and Facebook wall posts, solidifying a personal relationship with the customer. In addition, retailers should use their social networks to highlight their commerce channels to their community following. Consumers have no reason to engage in a deeper, more personal relationship with the retailer unless they are enticed with an attached value proposition—so it is up the retailer to create one.

According to a recent IBM Institute survey, consumers look for the following incentives/abilities when following a retailer on a social network:

Trial new products; Receive preferred customer status; Influence product development or changes;
 Provide feedback to a retailer on customer service or store experience;
 Learn of news and industry trends;
 Interact with other consumers; and 
 Share feedback and reviews with people in their social network.

But once retailers entice the consumers to engage with them socially, how do they then influence them to further interact by, as posed earlier, downloading their app? The same method the retailer used to obtain Facebook fans also increases app downloads: advertise app-only promotions on social pages and in the retail store, turn the app into the new store loyalty card, share brand news through the app and invite customers to take customer satisfaction surveys.

Now is the time for retailers to integrate their web, in-store, catalog and mobile channels if they want to provide their customers with a seamless, personalized and convenient shopping experience across all channels, anytime and anywhere. Many top retailers already have successfully enabled a cross-channel retail strategy, including Brooks Brothers, Cabela’s, Petco, Wet Seal and Toys “R” Us, and are leading the way by delivering to customers a great buying experience at all touch points across the brand. Those who do it right will build a customer for life.

Thanks to the guys at www.themobileretailblog.com

Related articles

1 Comment | Application Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

The growth of ‘F-commerce’. The history of Facebook commerce.

July 20, 2011

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Social commerce is an area which is estimated to grow to $30 billion by 2015. Obviously a market that is worth looking at; the dominant player ? Our old friend Facebook according to the latest stats Facebook users hit 750 million in July 2011 dispelling the rumours that Facebook was potentially running out of steam.

As mentioned several times on this blog we believe that it is essential that traditional retail get a foothold in this area or risk losing further ground to their online cousins and new market entrants who adopt new business models and steal market share very quickly. The infographic below highlights key milestones for Facebook but also some other interesting facts. enjoy……..

By the way there is also some really interesting data from JWT highlights are listed below:

JWT’s trend reports are the result of quantitative, qualitative and desk research conducted by JWTIntelligence throughout the year. Specifically for this report, JWTIntelligence interviewed experts and influencers in research, technology and business, and conducted a quantitative study in the U.S. and the U.K. The survey used SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online research tool, to poll 971 adults aged 20-plus from May 20–June 1, 2011.

Findings from the survey include:

    • The Millennial Generation is most interested in F-Commerce: More than four in 10 Millennials (aged 20-33) in the U.S. and the U.K. said they wish there were more opportunities to shop within Facebook, versus 26% of Gen Xers (aged 34-46) and 16% of Boomers (47-66). Nearly half agreed that they spend so much time on Facebook already, they might as well shop there too, compared to a quarter of Gen Xers and 14% of Boomers. Similarly, 48% said they wish the places where they shop had a page where customers could buy products/services directly on Facebook (27% of Gen Xers and 19% of Boomers said the same)
  • Privacy concerns are a big hurdle for F-Commerce: Nearly eight in 10 of American and British adults said they worry about the privacy implications of shopping directly on Facebook. Three-quarters said they “don’t think Facebook is secure enough to make purchases on,” and nearly that many said they “wouldn’t use a shopping application on Facebook because of concerns that it could compromise my privacy—e.g., shared with third parties.” Interestingly, while the Millennials have an appetite for F-commerce, they’re the ones most concerned about privacy.
  • Overlaying the social graph helps people make decisions more quickly: When asked about websites that offer personalized recommendations based on one’s Facebook profile, 46% of American and British adults felt that “there is too much information out there, so I think this is helpful”; Millennials were most likely to say this (59%), followed by Gen Xers (49%) and Boomers (31%). More than one-third said personalization of this nature helps them make decisions more quickly; again, Millennials (51%) were more likely to say this than Gen Xers (36%) or Boomers (21%).

history-of-f-commerce-large 

Related articles

Leave a Comment » | Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 745 other followers