See How to Build Frictionless Shopping Experiences for Your Customers

Facebook Business

March 04, 2019

This week, many of the world's largest retailers will come together at Shoptalk to learn about the latest innovations in retail technology and see how businesses can transform their shopping experiences for the mobile age. Shoppers' expectations for speed and convenience have never been higher, so it's important for businesses to meet these demands by building for the way people want to shop in order to maximize sales. But we know it can be challenging for businesses to create frictionless shopping experiences for their customers, so we've outlined a list of ways you can leverage our platforms and solutions to eliminate friction points throughout the shopper journey and make it easy for your customers to discover your products, make purchases and engage with your business.

This year, the opportunity cost of friction—any inconvenience or delay in the shopping journey due to usability issues or bad checkout flow—is projected to be $213 billion in the US alone. “40 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics," Baymard Institute, Jun 2018. "Retail Ecommerce Sales, US 2018-2022," eMarketer, Oct 2018 So now is the time to create a shopping experience that flows seamlessly for your customers.

Position your brand where your customers are already engaged

Let people discover your brand seamlessly in places where they're already spending time. Stories are where people discover and engage with content they care about, and this includes content from businesses. In fact, over 1 billion stories are shared every day, so be sure to position your brand where your customers are already engaged. Facebook internal data, Q3 2018 And as people spend more time engaging with video content, video ads are an effective way for you to capture your customers' attention. Fashion brand Mansur Gavriel used Instagram Stories to promote its fall 2018 “See Now Buy Now” collection, incorporating video into its full funnel approach, and the campaign drove 16.5X more clicks to the brand's website compared to the previous year’s show.

Help shoppers find the most relevant products and buy where most convenient for them

In order to create ad experiences that resonate well with your audience and save your customers time finding the products they're most interested in, you can use dynamic ads to automatically show the most relevant products from your inventory to the people who are most likely to be interested. From there, you can send interested shoppers to buy online or drive people to purchase in your store. You can use store sales optimization to reach shoppers who prefer to buy in-store, giving everyone in your audience a shopping experience that works for them. Dick's Sporting Goods used dynamic ads and store sales optimization to deliver the right ad to the right people, and encouraged them to shop wherever they prefer—either online or in-store. And by helping shoppers find the most relevant products and then purchase where most convenient for them, the sporting goods store drove $10M in incremental sales and 100,000 incremental purchases.

Shorten the path to purchase with shopping on Instagram

Make it easier for your customers to discover, shop and buy in just a few taps. Since 75% of monthly active Instagrammers already open Instagram with the intent to shop, we've made it easy for your customers to not only shop on mobile—but also to buy on mobile. “Project Instagram” by Ipsos (Facebook-commissioned survey of 21,000 people ages 13–64 in AR, AU, BR, CA, DE, FR, IN, IT, JP, KR, TR, UK, US and ages 18–64 in Japan), Nov 2018. All participants said they used Instagram at least once per week. Shopping on Instagram gives people quick access to product pricing and details by tapping on a product tag or sticker, and then expedites the checkout process by sending people straight to your website to purchase.

Improve customer care and drive results through 1:1 messaging

Messaging is how people communicate with their friends and family, and now, people want that same ease and speed of communications with the businesses they love. In fact, 64% of people would choose to message a business before picking up the phone or sending an email. "The Art of Communication: Messages that Matter," Greenberg, Inc. Nov, 2017 Messaging not only offers more convenient and effective support for your customers, but it also drives business results.

To make it easier for people to book in-store appointments around the holidays, Sephora enhanced its Messenger Assistant with features like unified date and time picker, appointment reminders and sync to calendar. As a result, the brand saw a 60% increase in appointments booked and nearly 50% more clients showed up for their appointment, compared to its previous Messenger experience and other mobile booking services.

Visit Facebook IQ to learn more about building a frictionless future for your customers.

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Strategy