For impulse shoppers, there’s a brave new world of social media

Impulse shoppers, welcome to a brand-new way to feed your fix. In the span of a few weeks last month, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram unveiled nifty new buttons that let users buy the must-have clothes, crafts and gadgets streaming by in their feeds. Google has its own button in the works, while Twitter has been quietly testing a “buy” button since last September. The age of social media shopping — a.k.a. social commerce — is upon us.

Well, almost. While it seems to make sense to combine the experiences of socializing with friends and shopping — as the inventors of the mall discovered ages ago — it’s easier said than done online. A bewitching combination of technical and psychological obstacles means that two decades after Amazon began revolutionizing e-commerce, social commerce is still waiting to get off the ground.

Is this the moment when users finally embrace Facebook, Twitter and rising networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat for their retail needs? That depends.

The Case for Social Shopping

When it comes to deciding what to buy, ads may sway our judgement, but input from people we trust often seals the deal. This holds just as true when bargain-shopping with BFFs at bricks-and-mortar stores as when hunting for deals on the Internet. Four out of five people say that posts from friends directly influence buying decisions. “Social proof,” as marketers call it, keeps the retail wheels greased and moving.

So what better place to buy online than social media sites where friends and followers are already hanging out and sharing information? “Here, the inspiration for a particular look isn’t sparked by some vacant-eyed model, but by friends and frenemies alike,” notes industry analyst Jake Sorofman in a recent blog post on the subject.

At the same time, the fleeting nature of the news feed — streaming by with the trends of the moment — lends a sense of urgency to the social retail experience. Exclusive offers and flash promotions add to pressure on social media “to act quickly or miss out on the deal at hand,” writes retail columnist Brad Tuttle in Time, and users tend to forgo the obsessive comparison shopping that characterizes other online purchases.

Plus, when done right, social shopping doesn’t even have to feel like shopping at all. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing and go to a special site or fill up a virtual shopping cart and head to checkout — all tasks that turn the fleeting joy of buying into a chore and sink many a prospective purchase. “Why usher consumers to the checkout line — and risk the abandonment of conviction, much less shopping carts — when you can get the deal done in that treasured moment of irrational awe?” writes Sorofman.

The Reality of Social Shopping

That vision of a seamless social media shopping experience is still a far cry from the reality, however. Until now, “shopping” on social media has generally meant being redirected away from the app or platform to checkout at a traditional retailer or e-commerce site. Especially on mobile devices, this represents a step backward in terms of convenience.

“[Everyone] uses their phone, but it’s still a pain to buy things,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at an event unveiling his network’s new Buyable Pins. “There are fiddly menus [and] you have to squint to see the images.”

Apart from the inconvenience, this is also bad business: By sending users away from their own sites, networks lose valuable eyeballs to other services.

Payment has presented a similar challenge. Amazon revolutionized e-commerce in the late 1990s with One-Click shopping — storing payment and shipping information so users didn’t have to go through a burdensome checkout process each time. The problem is that, up until now, social networks haven’t generally asked for those details or kept them on file. “More often than not payment credentials aren’t tied to social networks and consumers don’t associate them with payments period,” notes mobile commerce executive Jon Squirein the industry publication Pymnts. So the idea of effortless, one-tap checkout on social networks has remained largely fantasy.

These technical challenges are minor, however, compared with the logistical ones. For social networks to be effective as commerce sites, they have to integrate with the inventory systems of retailers. This means actively tracking purchases and stock at the thousands of merchants big and small that would be selling on their platform — a daunting bookkeeping task even for data-savvy social networks.

“[A] lot of these apps are saying, ‘We have millions of users, so we can just put in a payment processor and people will just buy, right?’” explains social commerce CEO Razvan Roman on Re/code.

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