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25/11/2011 by
5797 views

Step Into A World Of Social Selling

Social Commerce is basically Word-Of-Mouth applied to e-commerce. You trust the power of e-commerce right?

Are you ready to harness the power of social commerce?In the world of e-commerce, Europe is leading the way with 40% of the European internet population buying things on-line in 2010. How will 2011 be? We’ll see by the end of this year. E-Commerce helps small businesses grow, gives consumers access to all the products, doesn’t have closing times so a 24/7 window to sell and is being more and more integrated in daily life.

Consumers nowadays expect flexibility and thanks to our smart-phones they are always connected and start purchasing whenever and wherever they want to.

Social Commerce is buying where you connect and connecting where you buy… this provides our sales targets with:

  • better knowledge before they initiate a purchase,
  • better pricing for all
  • a fun and interactive shopping experience
  • an improvement in customer experience and
  • personalised experiences.
  • instant satisfaction

Social Commerce will improve your ROI on e-commerce… really? Yes, research shows:

  • 47% product increase of shopping basket
  • 40% increase of conversion rate
  • 45% decrease of product returns

This will mean for you that you do not have to hide behind advertising any more, you will have better informed customers, you can target your customers with better deals, get rid of overstock, increases your longtail and lets you tap into a new place to sell your products or services.

There are several forms of social commerce, ranging from; crowd sourcing that cuts down your marketing and R&D and provides customers with the products and services they want; to rating and reviews on your products which customers assess and build trust so increasing purchase frequency.

The good thing about social shopping is that it also drives traffic to your retail environments by providing coupons, gift vouchers and loyalty programs on location based services as an extra for retail incentives.

You do not have to go to all lengths to sell your stuff though social commerce; thanks to Open Graph you can easily integrate it to your own e-commerce environment. Adding this social sauce will give you a load of the before mentions against low costs. You can integrate the following social platforms through the Open Graph codes; Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google+, MSN, LinkedIN, AOL and MySpace.

What ingredients drive social commerce in respect to e-commerce?

  1. scarcity – less is more
  2. affinity – like minded people buying your product
  3. reciprocity – a payback or a favour you provide
  4. authority – people follow the leaders
  5. popularity – people follow the crowd
  6. consistency – one step at a time

Ask your agency what their vision is on growing your SoM, Customer Satisfaction, Sales and ROI… I assume these are the conversations you are having?

 

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