Shoppers are Sharing, but not Buying on the Social Channel

Why isn’t social shopping working? That’s what senior writer Matt Kapko at CIO.com wanted to know in his June 9 column about the disappointing results many companies see with their social-channel buy buttons. The answer Kapko points to is that it’s not the in-app technology, it’s the consumer behavior.

For two years, users on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites have had that direct-sales link to retailers, but people still aren’t using it. “Converting ‘likes,’ ‘hearts’ and ‘pins’ into buys is more than a technological challenge,” Kapko writes, adding that it’s not how social is working to deliver conversions.

Somewhere between the investment that Facebook is making in social shopping, and the news that Twitter has recently stepped back from its in-app plans because of poor test-run performance, are shoppers who love social. They engage with and share content on social platforms, but when it comes to the button? They aren’t buying it. Part of it is hesitation in trusting that an unfamiliar new e-commerce method will protect credit card information and other personal data, which isn’t an unwarranted fear. Counterfeit social media ads use the same sophisticated tech tools to tap into user preferences, offering products they then never receive – or when they do, the goods they’ve ordered are just as counterfeit.

Apart from fraud and security concerns about their transactions, it’s that potential customers aren’t that interested in seeing buy buttons in the first place. When GlobalWebIndex asked users for a 2015 report, they found only 9 percent of Facebook users, and just 12 percent of Twitter users are interested in one.

The most frequent activity on Facebook, according to researcher Jason Manders, is the most obvious: It’s hitting the “like” button, while 50 percent of users say they watch Facebook videos. On Twitter, it’s reading a news story. If users across all age groups want to research rather than buy a product, they still prefer a search engine, although younger buyers are warming up to using mobile and social platforms.

The future may well see better adoption rates, but one thing that Kapko and others are getting at is that social media isn’t just another channel to the end user. People connecting on social platforms are having a cultural experience they associate with ideas shared among colleagues, personal exchanges among friends, highly visual creativity based in user-generated content – all of which is what they expect to see. If they’re engaged with companies on social, they’re more likely to be researching products and services than looking to hit the buy button, and that research includes user reviews and customer experiences.

So companies seeking to close on conversions by decreasing the sequential steps it takes to complete a buy aren’t wrong. Customers themselves say they prefer the convenience, and predictably abandon a transaction when that convenience is missing, but companies that have used a buy button – and 59 percent of them still have not – aren’t seeing any immediate results and wonder about long-term ROI.

“A lot of smart people are trying to figure out what they’re missing,” said Jeev Trika of Crowdreviews, a user review and ranking site that emphasizes B2B relationships, software products and related services. “What we think might be happening is that people don’t just see an ad on Twitter or Pinterest, where they’re sharing user-generated content with each other, and decide to buy without more conversation. There’s almost a dissonance at work, because the buy-button content is in a space created for context.”

Precisely because it’s a social context, Trika adds, users are expecting a social experience. What happens instead may actually be creating a barrier within that context: They see a push ad for a product that an impersonal algorithm has presumed may interest them, they’re invited to buy it in the same moment, and that’s an appeal that occurs within an experiential journey consisting of one button. It feels sterile, and while that streamlining may attract certain buyers, marketing hasn’t quite figured out who they are.

What marketers do know is that up to 90 percent of consumers, in the B2B environment as well as the B2C community, are checking user reviews as part of their research on products and services. People seek and trust the opinions of others, and they do so within social sites that are based in relationship.

That’s just not the kind of experience that buy buttons are creating for them when they’re positioned on social media, although other strategies – placed within email appeals, for example – may work better.

To date, roughly half of U.S. retailers have tried the buttons, so there’s lots of room for growth as users encounter them on social platforms and perhaps develop more experience and all-important trust with them. Companies themselves, especially small businesses with arguably more to love because of their capacity to level the playing field in terms of costs, will better appreciate the barriers as well as the advantages to using buy buttons, in ways that deliver that moment of marketing clarity and discovery.

But discovery remains at the heart of the buy button problem, and it’s clear that at least so far, that’s not what consumers are doing – which may tap into another flaw, when it comes to consumer behavior and buy-button expectations. The reality is that for many shoppers, the process itself is the pleasure they seek, and it’s possible that the flaw in the buy-button theory is deeper than the mismatch of the social context. In order to delight the customer, he or she may need the touchpoints of a shopping experience, and that would remain true whether the buy was mediated on a social platform or not.

In other words, they need to shop. Consumers need to browse and compare and ask other people about their experiences. Businesses need to justify a spend with solid research; it’s amusing to contemplate a few theoretical conversations in which you explain to finance that you saw a buy button on Instagram. It may be that a buy button is a poor substitute for that shopping experience, no matter where it pops up.