COVID-19 and the digital disruption accelerated expectations from customers regarding their shopping behavior and brand preferences. This challenged the way the traditional shopping experience was before. Even in the end, this revolution will reshape the customer experience and the entire journey.
COVID-19 and the digital disruption accelerated expectations from customers regarding their shopping behavior and brand preferences. This challenged the traditional shopping experiences. Even in the end, this revolution will reshape the customer experience and the entire journey. Retailers must react to this situation by embracing change and evaluating new experiences and technologies.
To give you a better idea of how quickly the market is changing, take a look at the UK, where online sales have exceeded offline sales in the past 12 months. One-quarter of adults purchased online, and a third plan to do so again. 90% of British citizens under the age of 34 did their fashion shopping online, compared to 64% over 65. This trend will not change.
These market data show that it is no longer possible for retailers to speak about the digital-first generation; they must rethink their entire customer engagement strategy, marketing, and services (from the customer experience down to the payment systems and delivery).
Today, consumers expect sophisticated phygital ceremonies that are rich in storytelling, selling techniques, and the centralization of service pre- and after-purchase, all supported by intelligent data use. To get the best return on investment, a company should invest in both technology and employee training.
What is the customer journey? And how does it affect the way we buy?
To start the process of change management, fashion brands/retailers must first analyze recent trends and analyze their customer behavior at all touchpoints to identify areas of improvement. They should then project how their brand is perceived on the market against the image they want to portray and the profits they expect and create a plan.
What is the key to a successful customer experience?
Attention must be given, and improvements must be made in areas like touchpoints and processes, technologies, and services, as well as their availability and relevance both in-store and on the Internet. Today, the experience is played on a convergent scale that considers both the physical and online dimensions. They are not in competition but rather a continuum of touchpoints that influence the customer’s decision-making process during the journey to purchase and then later on when it comes to satisfaction and loyalty. To generate more business, it is crucial to focus on the customer at all times and tell a brand-rich story.
The integration connects all of these, and frictionless is their approach. Connected retail and mobile experiences are now a necessity: friendly UX designs to make it easier for users to discover the product, simplified checkout flows, continuous app updates, clearer product information, and other features to allow consumers to interact with brands in a more personal way. In the past year, in spite of store closures, we have seen an explosion of augmented-reality apps, immersive games, virtual experiences, live-streamed store events, live-chat with experts from the store, accelerated curbside pick-up, drone deliveries (in the US), and more.
What are some of the emerging omnichannel technologies that can enhance the shopping experience, apart from classic CRM emails, SMS notifications, social media, or interactive digital catalogs?
Own-Kind.com, a social commerce platform that connects stylists with brands and customers for fashion retailers, is a B2B2C platform. This solution is a plugin for a website that converts web traffic into leads with rich information. To receive the service, the customer must fill out all of his knowledge regarding sizing and styling preferences. The retail sales team can create custom looks for customers, including their items, to optimize the match. They then send them the proposals via email, WhatsApp, or text. It’s a virtual wardrobe that can create outfits for the retail sales team in under a minute. This is 25 times faster than InDesign or PPT. The company is a white-label PDF and includes payment links, redirects for your website, and links to book in-store appointments. The app also serves as a black book of customers for sales teams, storing all client profiles conveniently. This allows them to see what clients have purchased, declined, or previously owned. They can manage their customer relationships and view past purchases from the palms of their hands.
Video content is on the rise due to COVID-19 restrictions. Adweek reports that 75 million users access Facebook’s Video Platform each day and that 82 percent of consumer internet traffic is video. YouTube said that they have over 2 billion users who watch 1 billion hours of video per day. These trends will not go away, as once they become a habit, the benefits of shopping online/omnichannel are appreciated by consumers.
Many brands have chosen interactive solutions for their selling ceremony based on social commerce live streaming and social showrooming, where creators, ambassadors, and influencers can interact with customers directly and promote the products. They can also visit the store using smart glasses, schedule real in-store visits later, and receive all information before purchasing on e-commerce.
Social media platforms are working hard to compete with social selling and betting on emotional approaches. This is because web rooming starts online. According to eMarketer, social commerce is expected to grow by 34% this year, to $36 billion, and by % in 2020.
Spark AR Studio is a Facebook and Instagram reward program that rewards content creators who use AR technology for shoppable advertisements.
Brands can view data and insights for every sponsored Reel and Live Post that they are tagged in on IG. Influencers can access insights about the posts that they tag, and brands can see analytics on performance, engagement, and outreach. This feature is a follow-up to the launch of Drops, which is located in the Shop tab at the top. Drops is a relatively new e-commerce idea that helps sellers generate buzz about upcoming limited-edition items in the weeks and days leading up to their release. These products are usually only available for a limited time or in limited quantities, which increases demand.
TikTok is the channel that Millennials and GenZ prefer. Shopify is the world’s most popular e-commerce platform. It was created to allow influencers to make money online. Shopify’s dashboard allows for all aspects of ad management, including creation, targeting, optimization, tracking, and user behavior (gender and age). The hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit has now been viewed more than 3.1 Billion times on TikTok. This will tell you how many people have bought something based on what they saw on the app.
Pinterest has also launched an online shop that rotates every two weeks and features exclusive products from DTC companies. Pinterest’s shoppable page engagement increased by 200 percent between March 2020 to March 2021. Product uploads from merchants also increased 14 times in that time frame.
Google is instead working on a solution for product listings that will be released on YouTube in the near future. Features include videos, AR-try-on ads, product tags that are based on AI image detection, and video clips that can be manually added or deleted by Google’s image recognition system.
Visibility is a must, even for D2C brands or local retailers who have smaller budgets. This has become more important in recent years. Online presence means having a consistent marketing strategy. Who wants to run a shop without customers?
There are many options to monetize digital investments, including affiliate marketing, search engines, price-finders, Google Shopping, Facebook, and Instagram ads. Not all solutions are suitable for each brand. Each traffic driver should be tested.
Affiliate product marketing finder network is a proven and interesting solution. It works as a collection of products that can be filtered by price, country, color, material type, style, etc. The visitor is immediately redirected back to the brand’s e-commerce after clicking on the product details.
Shop the look. It, a fashion network in the EU and a shopping recommendation portal for discovering new products, acts as a virtual mall. Shop the Face is a shopping platform that aims to help local shops and emerging brands grow their online sales. It offers an intelligent link-building tool to improve the ranking of e-commerce sites on Google, an influencer network to run referral campaigns and an easy way for customers to discover new products.
Shopthelook’s backend is a simple CMS, which can be adopted easily by local businesses. Store managers and assistants can use its intuitive management. Influencers benefit from pre-negotiated relationships with brands and dashboards that show their performance. This allows them to share their sales conversions directly with their partners.
Shopthelook’s performance marketing platform is AI-based. Influencers can upload their content and tag directly the products on the affiliate network.
The platform reported a high rate of engagement from viewers. Shop the look. It has over 5 Mio items indexed and can generate over 1,000 views per day.
Renoon.com is a mobile app & search tool that focuses on sustainable fashion brands. It aggregates all the best deals and highlights the product details and brand concepts.
Renoon, which launched in 2020, has gathered over 1,000 products from over 200 sustainable fashion brands, including Stella McCartney, as well as dedicated multibrands like Luisa Via Roma or Vestiaire Collective. The ideal destination for socially conscious shoppers who want to shop with a positive impact on the world. It’s easy to use different filtering options. The apparel industry releases around 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. Every second, a truckload of clothing is sent to landfills. Only 1 percent of clothing is recycled to make new clothes. All of these factors increase the awareness among customers about sustainability.
Renoon.com (available in Google Play and Apple Store) indexes products and brands from a wide range of designers, including famous names and emerging talent. They are chosen based on a set of criteria, which includes environmental impact, organic materials and recycled material, fair wages, and ethical treatment of workers, as well as pre-owned clothing, accessories, and apparel.
Renoon’s proprietary technologies, which automate the processing of sustainability attributes of clothing and certificates of certification, are used to make the selection. The same applies to fashion brands as well as specific products.
For all those who love circular business, fashion cyclers, and designers, there is a new sustainable marketplace called Looped. Earth will soon be launched.
Looped was born out of the shift from mass production to on-demand, consumer-driven exhibitions. The output of 400 billion square meters of textiles per year is staggering. Of this, 60 billion square meters are left on the cutting-room floor. Climate change has made it more urgent to act. Upcycling fashion is an important and growing market where discarded textiles can be recycled to create new clothing that respects the environment.
So, emerging-conscious designers can find and purchase rare, high-quality, upcycled fabrics that were previously used in the production of luxury brands to create new, bespoke styles for sale on this marketplace. Finally, consumers can browse unique, limited collections and purchase them, knowing the impact of the manufacturing process on the environment and the water waste.
Live streaming explained
In the past year, live streaming, originally used in China for gaming, has become a powerful sales tool and has spread to Western countries. According to The Chinese Livestreaming Report, with more than 400 million online viewers, live streaming has become China’s most popular video format. Livestreaming is a powerful tool for marketing at a low cost, with over 200 platforms that target different markets and viewers.
In fact, some of the first innovators were famous ecommerce platforms such as Taobao, which was launched in 2016 and has now accounted for 80 percent of Chinese livestream traffic. TMall and Baidu, along with JD.com (in partnership with Kuaishou), but today, it’s possible to choose from multiple channels and providers. Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, and MOGU, a leading Chinese fashion app, has live streams that can be purchased.
Livestreaming is often associated with e-commerce in the form of “live commerce.” In China, it’s estimated that this business represents $60 billion per year, with peaks occurring during specific online events. For example, during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, Alibaba alone generated $2 billion in gross merchandise volume. Not all countries will perform the same, and cultural and economic differences should be considered. It is worth considering, given the positive initial results on Western markets.
McKinsey forecasts that live-commerce-initiated sales could account for as much as 10 to 20 percent of all e-commerce by 2026. Apparel and fashion are the first product categories to be showcased through live commerce, accounting for 36 percent of all e-commerce sales.
For small businesses, from independent designers to craft artisans, it is a way to reach out to new customers. The acceleration of the decision-making process from awareness to purchase is another important driver. It validates the relationship between existing customers and expands it to new markets.
Live commerce has a young target audience. Some companies have reported an uplift of as much as 20 percent.
Influencers, KOLs, and KOCs can perform live commerce. Viya from China is an example of a KOL who has broken her record for sales, generating 353 million RMB (roughly 49.7 million dollars) in one day. The “Associate livestreaming” is performed by internal employees who are trained from the showroom or boutique.
Amazon even launched Live Services to offer live streaming services to its vendors. In February 2019, the company introduced Amazon Live Creator, a mobile app that allows brands to stream video directly onto the website. Amazon Live was launched after other video-centric services, such as “sponsored” videos for Prime Pantry, a premium service offered by Amazon Prime that featured product advertisements. Prime Pantry, an attribution tool, allows advertisers to compare the effectiveness of ads on Amazon’s sites versus other sites. This is based on metrics such as page views, sales, and purchase rates.
Influencers who want to livestream on Amazon must be members of the Amazon Influencer program. This requires the approval of the company based on the number of followers, engagement, and other numbers of the candidate on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook.
Google also offers this service through YouTube. YouTube has announced that it will soon begin a test of in-stream-shopping within live streams in order to increase product discovery and remove any friction for customers when shopping online. This is part of the ongoing expansion and development of its creator-monetization tools and ecommerce tools.
YouTube is a great tool for promoting products. Thirty-three percent of shoppers have purchased items they found on YouTube. The watch time of videos that include “sale” in the title has increased by 400% in 2018. (Source: Google Statistics). TikTok has done something similar in the past, partnering with Walmart to broadcast live shopping.
Malls can also benefit from live-streaming.
Suntec City in Singapore hosted Shopfest last year. It was the first time that a live-streaming event had been held. The Great Singapore Sale was canceled due to COVID-19, a major in-person event that featured concerts, food stalls, and deals galore. Singaporeans missed out on this key retail extravaganza. Suntec City filled the gap by hosting a live event where shoppers could log onto the Suntec App every night between June 23rd and 26th to see new products being presented by hosts and then purchase them via the app.
Shopform is a dedicated solution for brands and retailers who want to own their marketing and sales data. Shopform is a B2C social commerce solution for fashion and lifestyle companies. It allows users to discover, shop for, and share small and medium brands. This helps brands grow by empowering the community and encouraging sales.
Livestreaming personal shopping is not the only interesting solution.
Bambuser is a live-streaming solution that integrates with Facebook, YouTube, CRM, and Booking Systems. It has an average add-to-cart in the stream of % and a 24 % chat engagement.
Livestorm, a browser-based video platform that manages online events end-to-end, is an all-in-one solution. This is an ideal solution for online live events or on-demand recordings. Its intuitive, frictionless platform allows users to host events on desktops or mobiles. The platform supports all workflows related to video engagement, including registration pages and invitations.
Smart manufacturing and social selling are both reliant on video streaming. Deep tech solutions to manage data lifecycles on top of streaming platforms to work all the data seem essential for companies who want to increase sales through social media. Radicalbeat is an interesting data analytics startup. Radicalbit Natural Analytics is a DataOps Platform for Streaming Data Integration, Real-time Advanced Analytics, and DataOps. It is ideal for smart manufacturing, as it can speed up the time to market with AI and machine learning technologies.
Even emerging fashion brands are attracted to the idea of establishing a more direct relationship with customers in order to match their preferences better. NextStyler is an example of a startup that has a new fashion label made in Italy called “Maison Academia.” Maison Academia, a new fashion brand created by emerging designers and a panel of experts, launches its collections through a dedicated website. The project is designed to encourage new Italian talent by facilitating aspiring designers to post their sketches on the Internet and have a community vote for them. The best designs are produced and then sold online.
Brick-and-mortar shops are forced to change their business model as e-commerce gains more and more consumers. Future-type shops are being launched in order to provide a unique customer experience that cannot be replicated in the virtual realm. These stores use information technology to improve the shopping experience of customers while reducing potential labor shortages.
In state-of-the-art stores, which use sensors and software, as well as electronics, to enhance the customer experience, customers can now try, feel, and touch products.
Tap Scan allows retailers and brands to offer rich, immersive digital experiences at the point of sale. The scannable technology can reduce packaging because the information doesn’t need to be printed out on paper, plastic, or card. Instead, it is stored behind a code that consumers can access on their devices. After scanning an item, the information is available on the user’s device. The app uses object recognition to identify the product and shows all the personalization options, as well as the colors…).
Zara has implemented another example of efficient technology in supply chain management. It also integrates workflow efficiently and improves customer experience by connecting brick-and-mortar shops with brand websites and apps. Store Mode, a feature of the app, allows users to check online for product availability in any store. The UK was the first to implement this new feature. The omnichannel experience is customized to display only the products and sizes available at that particular store. This allows shoppers to efficiently manage their time and search by checking bricks-and-mortar store stock in real-time via the Zara website and app. Store Mode Click & go will enable shoppers to purchase products via Store Mode and pick them up the next day in-store. The Click &Go items are available in-store using a QR Code after 11:30 am. They will be ready within 30 min. Geolocation is used in the Click & Find feature to help shoppers find items using maps. Click & Try is the last Store Mode feature. It allows users to reserve fitting rooms for five minutes using QR codes.
Brands and retailers can now, even with limited resources, make their sales processes more effective to reach their audiences and grow sales. In this digital transformation, the analysis of data will be crucial. It is also recommended that a different strategy based on a consistent long-term strategy is used.
