Social Media

Black Friday at Toys“R”Us this year will be all about loyalty and social media.

Seamless commerce is constantly evolving, and SAP is attempting to stay at the front of the curve with its new SAP Jam Communities with Commerce solution. The cloud-based customer engagement tool is natively built on the SAP Jam enterprise social collaboration platform, and also integrates with the SAP hybris commerce management platform.

At a recent event in Boston, SAP explained how the new solution enables retailers to build community pages that support and drive seamless commerce. Here are three of the most innovative community page features.

Consumers find it easy to use social media for brand engagement, but that doesn’t mean they are using it.

According to the new “Global Brand Simplicity Index” from New York-based branding firm Siegel+Gale, 65% of consumers say social media is a simple platform for learning about brands, products and services via social media. Yet only 32% use social media for this purpose.

Similarly, 45% of consumers find social media simple for engaging customer service, but only 11% use social media for customer service engagement.

Image-based e-commerce is becoming more popular on the consumer side, and now Shopify is making the retailer side more visually based.

The new Sello mobile app from e-commerce platform Shopify allows retailers to create a free online store by taking and posting photos of the products they want to sell, and then adding price and a brief description. No coding is involved.
Retailers can also use Sello to promote and sell products via platforms such as social media, email and SMS text. The only charges are fees from payment processors.

Visual social media network Instagram is taking a new step toward becoming a platform for commerce.

Instagram has launched a new program called Instagram Partners that is designed to help companies advertise on the social network. Each certified partner must have expertise in at least one of three defined areas: ad tech (buying and selling ads at scale), community management (managing comments and gaining consumer insights), and content marketing (sourcing and delivering content at scale).

It turns out that the No. 1 retail perk for shoppers is not speedy delivery, according to Deloitte's 30th annual holiday survey of consumer spending intentions and trends.

The survey shows that free shipping is the top retailer policy preferred by shoppers. Furthermore, the ubiquity of personal mobile devices allows consumers to take their time researching purchases and store policies giving them opportunity to request exactly what they want.

It turns out that the No. 1 retail perk for online shoppers is not speedy delivery, according to Deloitte's 30th annual holiday survey of consumer spending intentions and trends.

The survey shows that free shipping is the top retailer policy preferred by shoppers. Furthermore, the ubiquity of personal mobile devices allows consumers to take their time researching purchases and store policies giving them opportunity to request exactly what they want.

Visual search, or the ability to click on an image of a product and obtain information, or even make a purchase, without typing in any words, is growing in popularity.

Retailers including Urban Outfitters are offering variations of visual search functionality, and the failed Amazon Fire smartphone essentially made the world into an Amazon showroom with an advanced virtual search tool. Considering that Pinterest has become one of the leading visually-oriented consumer sites, it’s not surprising the social platform has joined the fray.

Mobile commerce is getting a lot of attention, but may not play much of a role in the 2015 holiday shopping season.

According to a new survey of more than 1,500 U.S. consumers from Accenture, only 2% of holiday shoppers are planning to do the majority of their holiday shopping on mobile devices, with most (43%) citing privacy and security issues as a major reason.

Retailers can use apps for more than just driving sales, as demonstrated by Office Depot Inc.’s latest mobile move.

The Office Depot and OfficeMax parent company is re-releasing its Elf Yourself mobile app. The app, which Office Depot has offered every holiday season since 2012 and launched as an online platform in 2006, is a prime example of how retailers are using apps to build positive consumer sentiment and brand awareness.