Social selling boosts online store sales

Social networking over the past decade has grown into a powerful sales support tool. Its effectiveness is based on direct interaction. Who should try it? How to do it well? - suggest experts from Shoper.

When launching a new e-store or introducing a product, it is important to remember that potential customers need to know about it. It is worth using social media for this. 70 percent of users searched on Instagram for shopping inspiration. A survey and report by e-commerce software provider Shoper in 2020 shows that among the activities aimed at attracting customers, e-commerce owners were most likely to invest in social media. With good reason. The Chamber of Electronic Commerce's "Omni-commerce" report states that consumers use social media most often to compare offers (22 percent), seek inspiration (22 percent) and search for information and opinions (21 percent).

Spontaneous live trading

The buying process - discovering products, searching for them, buying them - today takes place on social networks. A determined customer clicks on a link (e.g., on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest) leading to a product page on a given e-store, with the option of immediate purchase, or makes a transaction directly on a mobile app, without leaving it. Live broadcasts on Facebook or within stories on Instagram have become an important part of social commerce.

- In this way, you can establish and build an even more intensive relationship with the customer, better display the goods and enable live shopping almost like in a real store. This is a relatively new trend in Poland, but in China, for example, streaming services are a powerful channel for reaching consumers - more than 62 percent of Internet users use such platforms. That's more than 600 million people! The power of live streaming is also that it encourages spontaneous purchases. For example, the owners of the Green Emergency gardening store, which operates on the online shopping platform Shoper, share useful knowledge during live meetings, answer viewers' questions and present products with details on occasion. On Facebook they have gathered a community of as many as 290,000 people," comments Jacek Zientkiewicz, Development Director at the online stores platform Shoper.

Facebook selling

Among social media platforms worth selling on, Facebook plays a very important role. According to a Bizrate Insights study for eMarketer, in 2020, 18.3 percent of American adults made purchases on Facebook - by far the highest among social media. Instagram was second (11.1 percent) and Pinterest third (2.9 percent).

The key to success on Facebook is creating engaging content and building a loyal community. This is certainly what Agnieszka Niedziałek, who runs the e-store Na Piękne Włosy, has managed to do, having started by creating a fanpage with hair care tips (now with more than 93 thousand fans). She is now considered an authority on the subject, and her Facebook group "Włosing" has nearly 430,000 followers.

Instagram selling

Instagram is considered the future of social commerce. In the beginning it served as a platform for publishing photos, now it is also an effective communication channel thanks to the Stories option (more than half a million users daily). Half of online store owners Shoper have a profile on Instagram. 9 percent of them consider activity on Facebook or Instagram as the most effective activities to influence sales.

Magda Kucia-Ochal, creator of the Nancy Accessories brand, has set her sights on Instagram. Her store Nancyaccessories.pl offers a variety of personalized accessories, including cases, planners and jewelry. On her Instagram profile (more than 40 thousand followers), not only do eye-catching photos appear, a big role is played by communication with the community - primarily through Stories. Magda has also established partnerships with influencers who recommend her products.

TikTok selling

In which social media is there the most advertising? For 17 percent of those surveyed, such a place today is the TikTok service by many wrongly called a youth-only service. The idea of recording and sharing entertaining video content has caught on quickly around the world and across age categories, which more companies now want to use to their advantage.

TikTok itself is also developing its advertising tools so that merchants can better tailor ads to their audiences by gender, age, user behavior and video category, and then track the effectiveness of campaigns. Already, tools such as Brand Takeover and In-feed video are available for effective advertising.

Social-buying

Although the concept of selling through social media is not new, the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to rapid development in this area. Isolation has made customers long for face-to-face contact, and social selling more or less successfully imitates it in the virtual world.

Immersed in new technologies, millenials and Generation Z are more likely to engage in social selling than in classic e-commerce. According to a recent study by Influencer Marketing Factory, nearly half of young people in the US shop via social media at least once a month. They are most likely to buy clothes (41 percent) and cosmetics (23 percent).

- That is why it is so important today to conduct multi-channel sales: first of all, under the brand of your own store, but also in social media channels. A very important part of sales are advertising campaigns conducted in social media, which allow you to gain new orders and customers. With this in mind, we have launched a proprietary service on the Shoper platform Shoper Campaigns, through which we help our stores to increase the number of orders through effective Facebook, Instagram or Google search activities. Without this, it is difficult to succeed in e-commerce today," adds Jacek Zientkiewicz.

For more information, please contact: pr@shoper.pl.