Social commerce is a blending of traditional e-commerce type features with the benefits of social media. What does that exactly mean and why is it a good thing?? The best way to answer that is by example.
When you walk into a store and don’t see anybody. No one to greet you. No one to ask if you need help. No one for you to ask questions to. It’s just you and an empty store. Well that’s kind of what e-commerce is like really. Merchants load up their pages with goods and services to sell and customers eventually find their way in to look around. Sometimes there’s an email address that a customer can use to ask a question that eventually the merchant will get back to. It’s not immediate. It’s not interactive. In fact, most times the customer will ask a question through the email and then leave the site, waiting for an answer from the merchant. Unfortunately, the longer the customer is away from the site, the less chance that they’ll actually end up buying something. Or they may end up shopping somewhere else.
Social commerce changes all that. It gives the merchants the tools to promote and direct traffic to the goods and services that they want to sell. At the same time, it gives them a way to immediately engage the customer. They can respond to customers questions in real time, recommend add-on sales, and can use the tools in the platform to generate buzz and excitement about special products or offers on the fly. At this point it’s very much like having a well-staffed physical location with people available to answer all your customers questions and to help them make their purchases immediately. Any retailer knows that if you don’t have staff on hand to interact with the customer, you’re going to lose business. Well social commerce allows online and mobile businesses to provide the exact same level of service, rate of closed sales, and customer satisfaction that a physical store can provide.
As an extra benefit, because on a social commerce platform consumers follow the merchants that they like, it makes promoting a business and generating sales much easier. The customer is already aware of and interested in the merchant and wants to shop from them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be following them. Traditional e-commerce promotions like email marketing are often limited to the number of promotions a merchant can do per month. Social commerce doesn’t have those restrictions and allows merchants to promote in-system announcements and specials to their following consumers whenever they wish.
With social commerce, merchants can finally promote their business and build their sales the way they always knew they needed to. We mean what we say. With apitap, it really is like having a new store location in the palm of the customer’s hand. Sign-up today with apitap to start promoting your business and begin generating the sales that you know your business is capable of.
