There’s some incredibly exciting stuff going on for e-commerce owners inside the Facebook ecosystem and the Instagram ecosystem. With cryptocurrency coming online, Facebook’s looking to offer you smoother transactions within the platform and also integrate that to flow on into Instagram, no doubt, as they own both platforms.
Ecommerce store owners – How’s your customer journey?
So from users perspective, I just want to see how ecommerce store owners are actually trying to take advantage of that. You know Instagram have this great purchase inside the store. So I’m on this fashion brand, Decjuba, and they have a whole bunch of images here and you can see on the images you can purchase online and have a look at what products are for sale within this. So it’s like a “shop the look”.
I was going to do a whole series on bundling and I still think I will. This is like bundling but it’s more of a shop the look for your fashionistas. So let’s have a look. Tap the image and it shows you which products are available for this whole thing. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to go – okay, yes I’m gonna buy all of those; here are my sizes and it just selects the whole lot and adds it to your basket?
And I think that’s where we’re heading, but this is a plug-in that connects the dots and it doesn’t actually do it all. It doesn’t complete the experience if you like and I’ll show you what I mean. So if I go through and I want to select that “Hadley Stitch Detail Pullover,” it pulls that product in, but I still have to go to their website to complete the transaction. So I go to the website. It loads the website, over the top… yeah. Hey, look, I’m already actually lost! I have to scroll right down to find my size. I have to add it to the cart. I have to create an account, you know, like am I checking out? Okay, so I’ve done that and I have to go back – back – back – to go back to Instagram. I can even go back here – like it’s just painful!
I’ll keep going back….. oh I’m back on here. Yeah I’ll tap to view. I’ll go to the hexagon sunglasses as well from the same store. View on website, I’m sort of going in and out of this experience, it’s actually not a very user-friendly experience and there’s a reason for that obviously, a technical reason. Because Instagram doesn’t really want to pull in all the sizing data and all the inventory data that’s available from within your website, so to connect those dots is actually quite complex. We can understand why that’s quite tricky.
Improve the user experience and drive sales
However if we if we look on there – I’m going to go to their website… Decjuba… the actual main website has a Shop Instagram component on it. But now it uses exactly the same plugin with these numbers and but it shows you your list and I can add each one to the cart. So if I want to add this one to the cart I can select my size… “Add to Cart”.
So I would have thought why not just flick me straight back to this list? I want to complete this list really really quickly. To do that I would need my sizing and some colour options here – just in this one page. I don’t want to be thrown all over the place to complete the transaction. We’ve got to reduce that “cognitive load” for the user. Get them to feel like “ah I can just do this in one hit.” It’s actually technically quite difficult to build an experience like that to make it seem so smooth and seamless. But this doesn’t quite tick the boxes yet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if ecommerce store owners that are using this type of plug-in or using Instagram to Shop the Look styles are a bit upset with the overall result.
They wouldn’t be getting the conversions they actually want to get. So have a think about that. Have a look. If I had a Shop Instagram, I would actually fake the fact that I am on Instagram here. I would load this window with the numbers and I’d create my own little shop in here but just in a one press buy process in the whole thing. So maybe Decjuba need to give us a call!
But if you have questions about how you can optimize your user experience please give KND Digital a call. I would love to hear from you and we’d love to help you through your e-commerce journey.
