E-commerce Trends in Paid Social: Zero Friction Goal
Learn more about the key trends presented at the 2019 Facebook Summit in Toronto, and the reasons behind Instagram’s recent Native Checkout.
To introduce the conference day, Garrick Tiplady, executive director of Facebook and Instagram Canada, announced the four main themes of the sessions to follow:
- Community: it’s never been easier to join or create a group with common passions or values. The redesign of the Facebook app in April 2019 highlighted this idea with the notion of “Your Groups” and “Discover.
- Personalization (curation): with an infinite choice of products, services and content, and growing control over what we choose to read, see or buy, our expectations of personalization are increasing. Users expect unique, personalized consumption experiences.
- Conversation: social networks have torn down communication barriers. It’s now possible for anyone to question or interact with brands on social, which again raises our expectations for personalization. One example of the large-scale personalization of conversations is Chevrolet, who, in winter 2018, allowed people to make appointments for winter tires using a Messenger chatbot.
- Commerce: it’s often very easy to buy the same product or service from more than one brand. In this ultra-competitive environment, brands have no room for error; the customer experience must be impeccable.
Here is an infographic on consumer habits and expectations in 2019.
One of Facebook’s main responses to these changing consumption habits is, of course, Instagram Native Checkout, initially available only in the United States to a limited group of e-commerce brands.
Instagram Native Checkout was the focus of the Redefining the shopping experience session of Facebook Summit, but frankly, the presentation of its functionality weirdly echoed the previous session, Building a zero friction world.
The goal behind this new Instagram functionality is, you guessed it, reducing friction during the purchase process. It’s no longer a question of:
- See a product
- Go to the merchant site
- Add to shopping cart
- Enter banking information
- Complete the purchase
The process is done natively right in Instagram.
As you can see in the infographic, in 2019, it takes users an average of 22 clicks to complete a transaction. That’s huge! That many clicks is frustrating for customers, and makes them more likely to abandon their shopping carts. With Instagram Native Checkout, we are getting closer to that ideal of 1-click purchasing.
Conversation robots to support the buying journey
To make it easier for people to interact with brands, Facebook strongly recommends using conversation robots, or chatbots. The important thing to understand is that chatbots can be integrated at any point along the consumer’s buying journey, from the discovery of the brand, products or services, right up to post-transaction questions.
With more than 10 billion messages exchanged every month between individuals and companies, these new assistants are creating opportunities that are still very much under-exploited by companies. Chatbots could contribute nearly $112 billion in sales by 2023, according to a study by Juniper Research shared by Marketing Land.
Want to know more?
Facebook shared access to all its sessions. What do you think? What do these changes represent for your company? Talk to us about it, or contact us if you’d like help from our team in navigating all these major changes!