The Store of the Future plus Social Commerce

Blu Atwood
Feb 23, 2021

As way of introduction…

The pandemic has accelerated several trends in retail marketing. A short list of the concepts to emerge includes;

  1. Buy Online, Curbside Pick up
  2. Pop Ups
  3. The acceleration of all things digital commerce
  4. Virtual events
  5. Social Media shopping

Retail Trends for the Future

What does the store of the future look like?

Bloomingdale’s employees are doing virtual events and they have scaled the number of virtual events over the past 6 months. Customers can interact via group chats with shopping assistants or event host.

In addition, they are offering Virtual Shopping Appointments which take the form of a video tour of the store, creating a shopping list and making purchases.

American Eagle has kiosks where you can Scan QR codes for help putting together a styled and correctly sized outfit that can be picked up at the store within in an hour.

We can imagine greater use of text message with shopping assistants, as well as more robust use of messaging with customers to complete purchases, send personalized product offers as well as promotions to drive specific products sales when the merchants need it.

Text message not only makes for a superior conversational commerce experience, it also has the ability to simplify the tech stack. Text To Buy is easy to implement on the Textual platform.

Request a Demo to see how Textual solves text message shopping.

The opportunity of communicating and transacting purchases by text, is well expressed by Michael Brown with Kearney, a management consulting company.

‘Come in and buy from me’ today but it will be ‘Come in, have a brand experience, build your shopping list, let’s connect that on your cell phone so we can directly market to you.’

Social Commerce

There are some interesting numbers being put up by American Eagles virtual store on Snapchat. During the holidays over a 5 week period, they had 41 million impressions and sold almost $2 million worth of merch. These are impressive numbers.

We also took a few minutes to tune into the launch of TikTok live shopping video event. On December 18th, Walmart hired a famous TikTok personality, Michael Le, to showcase multiple products which were presented in a pop up widget. The viewers could click on the product widget which opened Walmart’s website directly inside the app. In this way Users did not have to leave the app to complete the purchase.

Why not collect SMS Subscribers during the live shopping broadcast? As with all events, visitors, or stores, there is a steady conversion rate somewhere between 1% and 25%. Most viewers will not purchase, however they may likely purchase something in the future.

Instead of relying on them to return to your specific channel, create an outreach program that matches their interest and enable live purchasing via text message.

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We like the direct and immediate results using Textual. We've generated Text to Buy subscribers quickly, and the conversion rate is unbeatable. The majority of orders come in right away!  Highly recommend this platform!
~ Megan Cotiliard

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