Viralogy

When Customer A visitors your eCommerce store, they more or less see exactly the same things as when Customer B, C, and D visits your site. Along the same lines, unless Customer A, B, C, and D knows exactly what they are looking for, they are likely to (A) click on what interests them immediately from what they are shown or (B) will leave your site.

Following this, we encounter one of the first decisions a customer faces during their shopping experience: ‘What should I look at?’ If the customer doesn’t see what they are looking for on instant, the less likely they are to want to stay on the site. While this is a problem that many eCommerce sites face, the solution is becoming clearer as the social space merges more and more with online shopping.

The Solution to the Problem

To begin, we introduce the term social commerce. Social commerce has been widely accepted as “a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.” Now that we have defined social commerce, we add on the concept of personalization to it which gives us social commerce personalization.

Rather than showing users generic site layouts which are seen by hundreds of people, all of whom have different personalities, tastes, and preferences than one another, showing targeted users specific products based on their past shopping experiences, social profiles, and characteristics becomes an effective way of increasing conversions on ones site. The key in all of this though is not to turn your eCommerce site into a social site, but rather to place an element of social shopping into it. Whether it’s blatant or subtle, there are many social commerce personalization tools out there that are helping eCommerce sites use social media to their advantage.

How They Will Integrate Into Your eCommerce Site

As mentioned, some eCommerce sites will use social media in ways that are more obvious than others, but regardless of the degree to which they use it, having some form of social commerce personalization on your site will continue to be a trending feature that eCommerce sites will look to use and benefit from.

Among the different ways to integrate social commerce personalization, the most popular is product recommendations. Some examples that have been seen include car recommendations by Volkswagen in which a particular car was recommended to you based on your Twitter updates as well as Levis turning their eCommerce site into a large social experience.

From product recommendation widgets to 3rd party eCommerce applications for your Facebook fan page, shopping online will continue to become more targeted toward personalizing an individuals shopping experience.

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If you are interested in learning more about social commerce personalization tools for your eCommerce site as well as more on how to increase your eCommerce store conversions, be sure to contact us and to check out our current suite of Viralogy products.