Shoppable Media: The Next Frontier
The trend is clear: Online shopping experiences are becoming less commerce-centric and more content-driven. Home and category pages leading with lifestyle videos, lookbooks, and trend-ambassador blogs are becoming the new normal. Leading with this type of lifestyle content creates experience differentiation and loyalty, and it helps customers connect with the brand. Yet, in order to drive conversion, many retailers are also working to make these content-driven experiences “shoppable” by incorporating hotspots that link to product details and the all-important buy button.
We think adding this navigation shortcut is critical, especially for shoppers on mobile devices, where patience for searching, scrolling, and navigating to find a particular piece last seen in a lookbook may be short. But we were curious. Would consumers actually prefer shoppable experiences?
To find out, we surveyed a panel of tablet shoppers and gave them a choice of purchase experiences.
The first was shopping via a traditional category page, locating an item of interest and clicking through to a product detail page. The second was a similar version built with Adobe Experience Manager using “shoppable hotspots” — a feature where tapping a hotspot on a product featured in the lifestyle image would drive the shopper to a quickview of relevant product details, including zoom, alternate views, colors, size, price, add to cart button, etc. The tester shops directly from the image without scrolling or navigating to another page.
Here are the links to the experiences. Try them yourself:
Which one won? Tell us what you think.
Of course, we expected shoppable experiences to be preferred, but the survey results surpassed even our best expectations. For example, 77 percent of those who viewed the shoppable site found it easier to navigate, a 29-percent increase over the traditional version. And 66 percent of those who used the shoppable site got enough information to make a purchase decision, a 25-percent increase over those who used the traditional version. Some retailers have reported conversion rates double when customers use shoppable hotspots, further indicating that this emerging technology is becoming the preferred way to shop.