The Social Commerce Fantasy
Using organic posts to get people to click, explore and then buy is difficult to optimize and scale. The Holy Grail is to build full buying experiences within the post itself.
Using organic posts to get people to click, explore and then buy is difficult to optimize and scale. The Holy Grail is to build full buying experiences within the post itself.
“We’re a social commerce startup. We’re trying to bridge the gap between people’s social streams and retail; it’s going to be huge.”
It was January 2012, and this was the pitch I received from a small group of engineers, friends and seasoned execs who had transformed their next-generation e-commerce platform into a CMS for building storefronts on Facebook tabs. They had just become PCI-compliant and were finally able to process transactions at scale. They had big clients like Target, Levi’s and Nike and millions in Bay Area venture. I jumped at the opportunity to join them.
Years earlier I had helped lead a major redesign of a very early iteration of the adidas e-commerce store and had fallen in love with the challenge of online retail. Compared to other digital marketing disciplines, it was tangible, results were immediate and measured in actual dollars, and iteration and optimization were the name of the game. I had also cut my teeth first on MySpace and then Facebook while working at Razorfish on the Coors Light account. Social commerce felt like alchemy, a fusion of two passions, and an obvious digital code to crack.
In February 2012, Facebook filed its S1 to go public; it didn’t ring the bell until May 18. At that time, we were solely focused on the desktop experience, paid advertising was nascent and not yet widespread, and organic reach was still plentiful.
Ah, the good old days.
But, as you’d imagine, using organic posts to get people to click to a tab app, explore and then buy was difficult to optimize and scale. The Holy Grail was to build full buying experiences within the post itself.
Believe it or not, with Facebook’s permission, we had been running expandable Flash – you remember, Flash posts where you could buy directly within the stream. It was fun and exciting, but it wouldn’t last. Soon after the IPO, Facebook decided allowing third-party Flash in the newsfeed was probably a bad idea and forbade it.
The idea of social commerce was completely compelling. It still is. We spend so much time in our feeds. We certainly discover products there, so why shouldn’t we buy there too?
“The likelihood that Facebook will ever [become] a key sales-driving tool for retailers is unfortunately far-fetched.” – Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester Analyst, Will Facebook Ever Drive eCommerce?
Desktop e-commerce is a relatively mature discipline. While total U.S. e-commerce sales are still less than 10 percent of total U.S. retail, with players like Amazon and eBay, it’s obviously a massive market. And the ecosystem of paid search, email, CMS platforms, analytics and optimization tools is well-established and, generally, it works. To drive e-commerce success today, an ecosystem must support these basic truths, as desktop e-commerce does:
I believe these are table stakes when creating a digital retail ecosystem that can drive real value for merchants. During our focus on social commerce from 2012-2014, Facebook and then Twitter didn’t have these key ingredients and the small group of startups dedicated to cracking this code have all now disappeared or pivoted away.
Despite the fact that Facebook announced brand page storefronts last week, I still don’t believe it has what it needs to realize the dream of social commerce.
Besides missing the robust retailer tools noted above, there are a few other challenges facing social commerce that I think must be addressed explicitly:
Sigh.
But there are a few small bright spots for those with the means to invest the time and dollars.
So last week we took another baby-step forward in the long, slow search for the unicorn that is social commerce. The forest is dense, and we can’t yet see her.
Facebook and Twitter have really smart people working on this challenge, and I hope they’re able to accelerate our progress, but I have to admit I still doubt that social as it stands today will ever be a significant direct driver of consumer commerce.
*Homepage image via Shutterstock.