September 14, 2015
Are retailers ready to buy into buy buttons?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have taken a further dip into online commerce over the past year, with each company announcing that buy buttons will be included as part of their offerings.
Although key social networks have promoted the buttons for months, only Pinterest has launched its version — known as Buyable Pins — on a large scale.
The lack of full-scale delivery has since curbed buy buttons’ hype, creating speculation over the efficacy of social platforms sales channels. More cause for concern comes from the lack of information from retailers that are testing the buttons.
For retailers, one risk is essentially handing over a portion of their brand to another party since the social platforms are controlling the buy button experience. A clumsy purchase experience reflects poorly on the brand selling the product.
Inventory management also can be a potential challenge. Buy buttons generally are designed to expose the consumer to one item for a fast purchase, so retailers must selectively pick and choose the items that are an appropriate fit for the service without being too limited in the offering.
Image: Pinterest video
Many retailers may also struggle to integrate their inventory management, payment and product information systems into social platforms because they aren’t used to selling outside of their stores and e-commerce sites.
With mobile commerce now representing 30 percent of U.S. e-commerce transactions, according to Criteo, buy buttons still represent a potential opportunity for retailers to capitalize on consumers’ innate desire to make impulse purchases, turning shoppers into buyers with just one click.
For buy buttons to become a major hit among e-commerce players, they will have to be deployed with the proper visual context, including accurate product details, images and even brief videos.
"Marketing and supply chain data will need to be synchronized in order for retailers to successfully integrate buy buttons into their business model," said Mike Lapchick, CEO of product content hosting platform Shotfarm. "Product images and details are going to become even more important with buy buttons, so retailers need to leverage a data management system that will allow them to easily exchange data and synchronize it across all channels."
Beyond leveraging product data, retailers must ensure that the company voice does not get lost in translation as it extends across social networks.
Discussion Questions
What’s your outlook for the viability of social media buy buttons? Do you see more opportunities or challenges for retailers?
Poll
BrainTrust
Ron Margulis
Managing Director, RAM Communications
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What’s easier, purchasing 100 items at a time, or 100 items one-by-one?
Buy buttons may be a draw for teens and for others not managing households, but those of us in charge of purchasing for a family will opt for as little friction as possible.
Social media buy buttons are the equivalent of impulse purchases in the store — with potential to go beyond that. From the consumer side, that means easy and fast one-click purchases. Both the search engine and the retailer win from the sale and the customer gets what they want. But as the article states, there are several challenges ahead.
Today’s commerce is a mix of online and offline and each of these carries many variations. Controlling the purchase experience gets tougher rather than easier from the business side, yet the buy buttons will become the poster child of how non-traditional players impact retailing and what retailers need to do to adapt to the new levels of consumer-defined convenience while collaborating with new partners.
The buy button is critical to the success of social media sites and lucrative for the retailer so solutions will be found to these issues. The technical ones with respect to buy button experience will be the easiest to resolve with better a API that gives more control to the retailers.
This is an inevitable iteration of the path for consumer buying behavior that ultimately leads to a Star Trek-like process of automatic demand fulfillment via tele-transportation or some similar mechanism. And fulfillment is the key here. It won’t be successful if the social media sites do just as good a job as existing e-retailers, they’ll have to do a better job. This could result in a significant opportunity for traditional retailers to partner with social media sites, creating a new competitor for Amazon and other e-tailers.
For many marketers the point of spending money on social sites is to eventually have the link to what it’s worth to do so, and buying behavior is a part of that. So yes, it makes some sense to be there. For consumers, it’s just one more way to get what they want when they want it, so it will be a useful button on occasion.
But my sense is that the buy button will be less used than many might suspect. I see it as something people will do on a whim rather than something they will use on a shopping trip model.
There’s more and more out there around the power of clout in the social sphere, this just makes it easier for people to take action on a clout-based recommendation. I work in digital retail and, honestly, I’d pay money to force Facebook and systems like them to remove all paid retail/product ads and replace them with feeds from my friends on the products and services that THEY love. Isn’t that what social media was about in the first place? Unbiased sharing? My gut is that the retailer would make more money paying an affiliate fee for this kind of scenario than pushing ads anyway — if their product is worthy, that is.
With all eCommerce, this has got to be a seamless process—for the shopper, the retailer back office and the supply chain ecosystem. However, this is not insurmountable by any means. I think the opportunities are virtually limitless, as long as transaction execution is taken seriously.
There will be a lot of challenges for retail, but this is an inevitable step. First off, retailers need to own the transaction in order to provide their own brand of service. That is a must even if they opt to use outside fulfillment.
Bottom line, retailers need to be where their customers are and be able to sell when and how the customer wants to buy.
For my 2 cents.
I think the focus on “buttons” is missing the point. The ability to turn social media content into shoppable images has huge potential however it is facilitated (as long as it’s easy, seamless, non-invasive). While initially it might attract the impulse purchase (see it>like it>buy it), over time consistent expectation of shoppable images can easily turn platforms like Instagram and Pinterest into powerful organically-planned shopping destinations. A very cool new solution—WantItBuy.it—is designed to let brands/retailers monetize their content and integrate into any commerce platform (cutting out dealing with the social platform owners), even offering geo-location to enable consumers to buy the socially-presented product at brick-and-mortar if they so choose, in lieu of online ordering through their mobile device.
The “Buy” button gives the customer instant gratification. The key is to make it easy. Amazon has 1-Click, and it is a beautiful thing. Once it’s set up, the customer simply clicks on the item they want…ONCE! No checking out. No extra steps. It really is just one click. So make the “Buy” button a frictionless experience for the customer and you may see an increase in online sales.
Making the buying experience as easy as possible is the way to go for retailers. If social media buy buttons provide another channel for retailers to sell their products and provide a seamless and on-brand shopping experience, then they’re a great idea. This will only work for retailers that have a good understanding of their audience on social media and what they like. If technical difficulties or incorrect product placement get into the equation, then buy buttons will end up being a waste of time and money, and will hurt brand positioning.