Innovations in social commerce are paving the way for wider acceptance from consumers. Buy buttons on social networks make images shoppable and transactions simple. Social commerce platform Threads, for example, recently raised $20 million to sell luxury goods via social networks such as Instagram and WeChat. Threads is using the funding to develop artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots to enhance the shopping experience.
Here is a list of social commerce apps for merchants. There are social networks with new tools for commerce, and there are additional tools to help merchants make their products social. Most of these tools are free.
Amazon Spark
Amazon Spark
Part of the Amazon app for iPhone and Android, Amazon Spark allows followers to discover and shop stories and ideas. New users select at least five interests to create a feed of personalized content from Amazon customers with similar interests. Users shop a feed by tapping on product images or photos with the shopping bag icon or interact with people by commenting or smiling on their posts.
Scroll to the top of your feed and share a product or story, and easily tag products to make a post shoppable. Earn a “top contributor” badge for frequently sharing high-quality content.
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Instagram Business
Earlier this year, Instagram launched Shoppable Posts, making it easy to tag and shop for products directly from the platform. In both new and existing posts, users can tag up to five products per single-image post or 20 products per multi-image post, and shoppers can complete purchases without leaving the Instagram app. Also, Instagram has recently expanded shopping in Stories and Explore. Businesses will now be able to add one product sticker to any story with customizable text color. When shoppers tap on a product sticker, they’ll be taken to the same product details page that they see when they tap on a shopping post in a feed.
Also, Instagram is also testing a topic channel for shopping in Explore. The shopping channel will be based on each user’s shopping interests and will display shopping posts from a variety of businesses that the user may like. BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud all integrate with Instagram.
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Facebook Business
For years, Facebook has been attempting to develop its buy buttons and ecommerce features. Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento all integrate with Facebook, giving sellers the ability to provide customers with a seamless transition from a Facebook page to a store gallery. In addition, last year Facebook extended its Buy Now button to its Messenger application. With a buy button in Messenger, users can interact with and purchase goods and services from retailer bots without ever leaving Facebook.
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Pinterest Business
In 2015, Pinterest began rolling out Buyable Pins, letting customers purchase products without leaving the pinboard and social bookmarking site. Today, merchants can reach Pinterest’s 250 million monthly active users with product rich pins to show the most up-to-date price, availability, and product description. Pinterest integrates with BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, IBM Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Sellers can also choose to promote pins, target audiences, boost traffic, drive actions, and measure impact through self-serve tools, sales support, and third-party measurement partners. Pinterest also offers a Messenger chat extension and bot to enable pinners to search, share ideas, and buy products through Messenger.
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Beetailer
Beetailer
Beetailer is a tool to import your existing web store on Facebook. Beetailer integrates with Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop, and Amazon Webstore. If you don’t use any of those platforms, create a Facebook store from scratch using a custom store feature. Beetailer also offers a variety of tools to promote your brand and products, automate your marketing, integrate Facebook comments in your store, and measure results. Beetailer offers a free account for one store and up to 30 products. Premium plans start at $40 per month.
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Shop Social
Shop Social
Shop Social is a tool to make your Instagram photos shoppable on your ecommerce site. Instead of giving a single link from a photo, tag multiple products to your posts. Direct everyone you reach on Instagram to your URL or integrate your Instagram feed to your website. Monitor clicks and performance through the admin panel and integrate Google Analytics. Add a product gallery tab to Facebook as well. Shop Social is $49 per month.
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LIKEtoKNOW.it
LIKEtoKNOW.it
LIKEtoKNOW.it enables brands to create shoppable influencer images for Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and across the mobile web. To publish shoppable LIKEtoKNOW.it content, sellers must become a rewardStyle influencer. Influencers tag products in their images and LIKEtoKNOW.it delivers the shoppable product details. Followers discover and curate collections of ready-to-shop photos directly from the LIKEtoKNOW.it app. Contact for pricing.
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Inselly
Inselly
Inselly is a marketplace for Instagram, bringing together all the sales offers and making them searchable, sortable, and shoppable. Sellers can snap product photos with the Instagram app, add an #inselly tag to the image along with any relevant category tags, and log in to Inselly.com to add details about items. Inselly is free.
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WeChat is the Chinese social media, messaging, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. Released in 2011, it’s one of the largest mobile messaging apps with over 1 billion monthly active users. Along with mobile messaging, WeChat users send mobile payments, make video calls, pay utility bills, schedule doctor appointments, order taxis, play games, share locations, and more. While WeChat may not be the first app that comes to mind for Westerners, the social commerce habits of its large and active user base are worth watching for merchants across the globe.