How Social Commerce Platforms are Driving E-Commerce Sales

Social commerce is a rapidly growing subset of e-commerce that helps merchants sell products and services directly through popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Merchants have the opportunity to utilize these social shopping platforms as vehicles to drive revenue for their businesses. Adding social commerce functionality to e-commerce stores allows consumers to conveniently interact with brands, shop for products, and make purchases without ever leaving the social media platform.

Most merchants currently use an e-commerce site component to expand their businesses as options to access goods and services have moved beyond the brick-and-mortar storefront. However, the e-commerce strategy does not come without challenges.

Typical challenges business owners face managing e-commerce stores include shopping cart abandonment issues, driving revenue, and staying competitive as technology continues to evolve and the e-commerce medium becomes even more saturated.

Social commerce functionality optimizes selling across social shopping storefronts instantaneously. It helps business owners stay competitive through improved online visibility. Incorporating a social commerce component into an e-commerce store will facilitate growth and help drive revenue by allowing merchants to capture larger online consumer audiences. Additionally, social commerce puts an end to shopping cart abandonment issues by offering consumers a streamlined purchasing journey and an enhanced shopping experience.

Social Commerce Vs. E-Commerce: Streamlining the Purchasing Journey

Utilizing e-commerce allows businesses to offer consumers an online shopping experience through a website or branded app built on an e-commerce platform such as Shopify or Amazon. In this setting, customers are driven to online stores through digital ads, social media content, and other influencer marketing strategies.

Once the consumer reaches an online store, they must go through multiple steps in their purchasing journey before completing their transaction. These added steps could lead to customers losing interest prior to completing the purchase. This results in a lost sales opportunity for the merchant.

Additionally, over 90% of users access the Internet through their mobile devices. However, only some e-commerce sites are optimized to be mobile-friendly. This lacking advancement contributes to the high shopping cart abandonment rate of over 85% among mobile users.

Social commerce differs from e-commerce as it brings the store to consumers instead of redirecting them to an online store to begin a multi-step purchasing process. It enables the consumer to quickly and conveniently check out directly from their social media platform. This makes social commerce a highly effective tool for reaching a wide range of audiences. It eliminates extra steps and streamlines the buying process, creating a smoother, more convenient buying experience.

This improved experience reduces customer drop-off resulting from lost interest. In addition, social commerce modules are built to be mobile-friendly, further optimizing the user experience and resulting in fewer instances of shopping cart abandonment.

Social Commerce Solutions for Businesses

Visibility and Engagement

Businesses have implemented e-commerce site components to stay competitive in the digital age. Today, the prominent digital presence that social platforms help establish has become essential for businesses to acquire.

Businesses utilizing social commerce find that they do not have to invest as much time and money to draw users to their e-commerce stores and convert them into customers. Social commerce bridges this gap by allowing businesses to connect with users on the platforms where they already spend their time, providing immediate brand visibility. Additionally, social media activity increases traffic to the merchant’s website, which helps improve its search engine ranking.

In addition to brand visibility, social commerce facilitates engagement with users automatically. Merchants can publish posts that include shoppable tags pinned to products being advertised. This encourages users to tap on products they are interested in and purchase them in just a few clicks. Merchants can also host livestream shopping events that create even more opportunities to connect with their audience. Livestream shopping events yield high conversion rates, higher engagement, and lower product return rates.

Driving Revenue

Social commerce integration enables e-commerce stores to operate on social media platforms, markedly expanding their customer reach. It helps businesses drive revenue by capturing an untapped target audience wherever they may be. Social commerce channels also provide metrics for impressions, engagement, and reach, delivering valuable insights to businesses that allow them to categorize their audiences and share tailored content to cultivate a targeted following.

What drives this generation of consumers to purchase on social media channels, especially when they have no plans to buy anything? Top motivators include the fear of missing out on an exclusive item, finding what is perceived as a “good deal,” product reviews, influencer recommendations, as well as the streamlined purchasing experience these platforms provide - a significant factor for many online shoppers, who value the convenience of not leaving the platform when making a purchase. Knowledge of these factors and being armed with insights about consumer behavior allows merchants to leverage social media platforms to pinpoint perfect opportunities to engage with consumers and inspire them to impulse buy.

Customer Retention

Lose fewer customers along the purchasing journey by making the shopping experience more seamless with less steps. Customer service is also delivered directly and publicly, allowing merchants to demonstrate how they value their customers. Direct interaction with customers on social media not only helps with customer satisfaction and retention but also enables businesses to enhance their brand image and reputation.

The Omni-Channel Solution

Stay competitive in today’s digital age as it embraces social commerce. Improve e-commerce conversions and customer satisfaction by leveraging the latest e-commerce software solution. By enhancing your existing store through implementing social commerce functionality, you could develop an omni-channel solution that will help you optimize inventory, engagement, and sales across all platforms.

Implementation of Social Commerce Functionality to Drive E-Commerce Conversions

To expand an e-commerce business, it is necessary to connect the platform the e-commerce store uses with social commerce software using APIs to effectively incorporate shopping carts and other related components.

Working with Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify-certified partners could provide backend development services to businesses that will augment their existing e-commerce software. Seasoned developers can customize e-commerce stores and multi-store platforms through API integrations and custom extensions. This allows for easy integration of multiple social commerce shopping carts with both web and mobile applications. These enhancements will save time and money and make your business more profitable.