Online discovery will drive gifting this Christmas
It’s that time of the year that brands will be considering how to maximise the biggest sales moment on the annual calendar: Christmas. As consumers remain reluctant to risk spending time in crowded stores, online shopping will play
¿ perfect gift.
Due to coronavirus-induced lockdowns, e-commerce growth has outpaced estimates, growing by 66% in 2020, according to World Wide Worx. This has led to new shopping behaviours, which in turn are creating new challenges, but also opportunities for brands who wish to position themselves on this ever expanding virtual shelf. To understand these shifts in shopping behaviour, Facebook worked with YouGov to commission research across 32 markets, including South Africa. We’re seeing a few key trends.
Mobile, social shopping
¿ that their mobile device has become their biggest shopping tool. The majority state mobile is the easiest way to discover (75% compared to 23% in-store), research (85% vs 15%) and even purchase (60% vs 39%) products. Considering that mobile users are spending the majority of their time on social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are in effect becoming the new storefront.
Discovery Commerce
This in turn has led to a shift from “Intent Commerce” to “Discovery Commerce”.
Intent is when you know exactly what you want to buy and you go to your favourite store to purchase it. Discovery, however, is spontaneous shopping; it’s browsing through your feed, seeing your favourite chef demo a product, clicking on the shopping tag and going straight to purchase. Shopping is now a continuous experience. On mobile, and
¿ are always shopping. 96% of holiday shoppers in SA tell us that they’ve made a spontaneous discovery whilst shopping online. This is particularly important for the holiday season, as the majority of spontaneous discoveries are gifts. 64% of holiday shoppers in SA who tell us they discovered something new on Facebook, say that this discovery was a gift for someone. Finding gifts are hard and discovery whilst browsing helps solve for this.
This Christmas, as the online
À continues to merge, brands need to consider how to make discovery easy and engaging.
The Discovery engine
To aid discovery, there are four core ingredients:
• Personalisation: With Discovery Commerce people
¿
¿ combining machine learning with data that people have chosen to share, you can bring value to people by connecting them to products and experiences they love.
• Inspiration: To stand out in a cluttered feed, you need
¿ creative and experiences to capture attention where people are: on social media.
• Conversion: Once you have the attention, a quick and seamless path to purchase is required. Shoppable ads, Lead Generation ads and Click to Messenger are but a few advertising formats that can help you do this.
• Measurement: Adopt a test and learn approach. Optimisation and measurement solutions enhance experiences throughout the journey and over time to help you achieve and exceed your festive season goals.
Next week we’ll take a closer look at some of the tools available to help advertisers drive serendipitous discovery online, on mobile, in a social interactive way.