Building shop windows on social media

Social commerce is soaring. The trend that merges the power of social media with the ease of trading online is reshaping the world goes shopping.

Social commerce is the use of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to market and sell products and services. Customers can complete purchases without leaving social media apps. The social media feed has become the new shop window.

Yael Weiss Ayalon is user relations manager, ecommerce, at Wix, the website builder used by millions of people worldwide. She says: “While ecommerce continues to be a significant player in the retail industry, there has been a growing interest in social commerce in recent years as more businesses and consumers turn to social media platforms for shopping.

“This growth of social networks, coupled with the democratisation of ecommerce capabilities has changed how merchants can build their business. “Anyone who wants to create a retail brand can do so by leveraging ecommerce platforms to create an online store, as well as generate awareness by leveraging social media and quickly begin selling their merchandise.”

According to reports, global social commerce is expected to grow nearly three times faster than traditional commerce to $1.2 trillion by 2025, up from $492bn currently. Forbes notes that roughly 62 percent of this growth will be driven by millennials (33 percent) and Generation Z (29 percent), with Generation X (28 percent) and baby boomers (10 percent) trailing closely behind.

Social commerce will continue to eat in to the ecommerce market as more and more consumers shop on social apps. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have added features allowing businesses to create shoppable posts and ads, making it easier for customers to buy products directly from these platforms; Instagram has a designated shopping tab, Facebook allows the creation of native store pages for businesses and TikTok introduced live shopping capabilities and functionality for catalogue integration. And Wix is actively empowering social commerce for businesses through various features and integrations. It recently announced an integration with Meta for merchants to connect seamlessly with their customers across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. “

This new integration provides a central place for merchants to manage all of their customer interactions across their social platforms with their website,” says Weiss Ayalon. “This helps them to manage interactions across the entire customer journey and grow their multichannel sales and communication strategies.”

Wix also offers sales channels where users can connect their store catalogue directly to social media platforms. “For example, for Facebook Marketplace or Instagram Shop, users can list their products directly from their Wix Dashboard and then post the product on Facebook and Instagram, where they can include the product in posts and tags and drive traffic to their site to purchase,” says Weiss Ayalon, who notes that most of their user’s sales and traffic are coming from the users’ social media.

“It [social media] has become a great way to leverage and reach multiple audiences, create social proof for products and generate traffic to one’s site. Today’s shopping experience is omnichannel, and it’s important that merchants have a strategy that incorporates social commerce as social commerce and ecommerce complement each other.”

Founded in 2006 by Israeli developers Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan, Wix has become one of Israel’s most valuable companies. It has a net worth of $4.43bn (at the time of writing) with more than 240 million registered users. In 2013, Wix went public, listing its shares on Nasdaq. A decade later and the online landscape has changed drastically. And Wix, which started primarily as a drag-and-drop website builder, has undergone significant changes as the company has evolved including going from flash to HTML, adding new verticals to meet the needs of users and establishing the Wix App Market to offer users specific products and integrations to help them power their sites and efficiently run their businesses.

Wix recently launched its AI Text Creator within the Wix Editor, to help users generate tailored content for their websites. At its core, Wix remains a website-building and hosting platform that enables anyone to create and manage an online presence, regardless of their web design/online expertise. Creating an online store nowadays has become much easier thanks to the number of available platforms but, according to Comma Consulting and a research project completed by Forbes, Huffington Post and Marketing Signals, 90 percent of all ecommerce (online only) businesses fail within the first few months of launch.

Weiss Ayalon says: “Establishing that business, growing revenue and scaling can be a big challenge, and there are reasons why 90 percent of all ecommerce businesses fail within the first 120 days of launch.” She advises vendors to have a simple and transparent checkout process, clear and accurate product pages with images with authentic product reviews, use AI to help create useful content for products and ensure the mobile version of the site is easy to navigate.

www.wix.com