Social commerce combines the persuasive power of social media and e-commerce to deliver immersive shopping experiences. Recent research predicts that, by 2028, the global market size for social commerce will have grown by 28.4% to US$3,370 billion, with China being the current forerunner.
As pandemic restrictions necessitated, many shopping trips in 2020 took place outside the traditional brick-and-mortar store, or at least void of the physical aisle-browsing experience. Same-day curbside pickup became a safe and convenient alternative, and e-commerce transactions skyrocketed as consumers shopped online. In fact, Digital Commerce 360 estimates that, compared to 2019, e-commerce transactions grew by more than 40% last year.
Did you know that five billion users of the top five social apps post 41.6 million messages a minute? Or that three billion JPEG images are created every day?
Not only does this tremendous volume of peer-to-peer activity profoundly affect our social lives, it has also revolutionized the way shoppers navigate the purchase journey. How? By reading unbranded feedback and the like from other users, shoppers can avoid marketing hype and make purchase decisions based on what they often consider to be objective, honest opinions on the merchandise.
With videos becoming more and more paramount for promoting online sales, we at Cloudinary Labs are building technology to help grow the business of e-commerce retailers. This series of blog posts delves into a few use cases that promise to boost retail revenue online across the patron’s browsing journey through the e-commerce site.
Attracting visitors to engage with your product videos is an excellent way to boost clickthrough rates, and ultimately, sales. The question is, how do you generate that engagement? Playlists and clickable links come to mind, but generally they appear only after a video has finished playing. For a more captivating user experience, add relevant interactivity throughout the video.