Buying a product online has always been an isolated experience. The closest it has gotten to social shopping so far has been reading reviews of other people you didn’t know. That was good and we loved it. The collective knowledge allowed us to get a better sense of the quality of the product and Amazon made it easy for us by comparing the worst review and the best review side by side. Don’t get me wrong, reviews and rating systems are great and they clearly have an impact for online conversion rates. But we’ve entered into the age of the social web and that’s going to change things. We have to change the way we think about social e-commerce shopping and online conversion. We need to  re-engineer persuasive design in this new social space.

As the web evolves into more of a social tool it will impact the way we decide which products to buy and from whom. Fundamentally this shift comes from better communication tools, which are spreading social influence. Social media is really just our pursuit for conversation and connections between people.

The social influence of friends on purchasing decisions is nothing new. We’ve always had friends or family members who were the resident “expert” within our group about some product category that we were considering buying at one point or another. Perhaps we asked the opinion of a friend before a purchase or even brought our expert friend with us to the store to help us buy because they knew more about choosing the best product than we did and their opinion has always carried a lot of weight. Social influence has and always will be a part of the buying process, perhaps more so for larger ticket items, but technology is enabling us to extend the reach and impact of our own individual circle of influence. The ability to communicate with our friends and family anywhere and anytime instantly is just the world we live in today.

The social web will change the way we buy and shop online.

A great example of this change, which we’ll be looking at in depth here, is BestBuy and Facebook. Best Buy is using some very interesting social online buying strategies that all e-commerce sites should take a look at.

They’ve incorporated their online store into Facebook with a simple Product Search feature. Nothing too earth shattering here but the strategy is what’s important. They brought the store to the people, instead of the people to the store. The importance of this will be more apparent in a bit.

The influence of a social online shopping experience is illustrated with two simple buttons, a SHARE button, and a GET ADVICE button. The share button pops open a pre populated message box with the product picture, a link to the BestBuy site and space to share what’s on your mind with your group of Facebook friends. Bravo to BestBuy for giving up control and allowing the people to express themselves, good or bad next to a product they carry and their brand. Giving up control and providing tools for communication is key to influence on the new social web. This allows a genuineness that is coming form someone you know rather than being forced on you from an advertisement. This is a big shift in mindset for marketing.

But how is this important to raising your online conversion rate?

The SHARE button taps into two very powerful persuasive techniques, commitment and consistency. Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistent principle on direct human action. Prominent theorists Leon Festinger, Fritz Hieder and Theodore Newcomb view the desire for consistency as a central motivator of our behavior. Essentially we fundamentally have a desire to appear consistent with what we have already done or said we would do. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our decisions. This pressure is amplified if we put it in writing and make it public.

The SHARE function takes advantage of this persuasive principle brilliantly. BestBuy is hoping a prospect will share their intent to buy, a virtual real time wishlist. “I want this.” Which is both written and made public as a Facebook update to all your friends. Once you’ve committed to the product, you’re intent to buy has just been magnified and the invisible psychological pressure to be consistent with your commitment begins to build. Having brought the store to the people amplifies this even further if your friends reply to your post with a comment or “Like” click as a way to support your commitment. This would not be possible on the BestBuy website, only in the social space where you’re interacting with your friends can this persuasive principle be fully leveraged. You can then choose to take the next conversion step right inside the walls of Facebook and click to buy, which takes you to BestBuys site.

For as great as this is BestBuy should go one step further. Their strategy is spot on but are they truly tying the product and commitment with BestBuy? A prospect has publicly announced their intent to buy but who will they buy from? To fully leverage the power of the consistent principle there needs to be commitment to buy specifically from BestBuy. This commitment does not have to be to buy now, as you may not be ready to purchase, yet. But it does need to be added to the feed post in order to be public, which will start the psychological pressure for me to be consistent with my commitment. I suggest the addition of an optional check box or a dropdown with a few choices all geared toward buying from BestBuy at some point in the future. The simple click of that “Buy at BestBuy” or “BestBuy has the best price”, etc. would be enough to tie the commitment to BestBuy psychologically.

The GET ADVICE button spreads our sphere of influence and expands our circle of resident experts that influence our purchase decision. We no longer have to rely on that one friend who knows more about this product than we do and is available to come with us to the brick and mortar store. We can now tap into our extended social network. All of who can play equal roles in influencing our choice of product and purchase decision. Never has it been more important to have a quality product than now. You can’t hid behind marketing and advertising any more.

This social influence is extended even further with a gift ideas feature, where prospects literally reach out to the knowledge of the crowd for gift ideas. The social aspect of tapping into a collective consciousness is a new element in online shopping and we are only at the forefront of innovation in the social influence space online.

This is the beginning of the game changing social shopping experience in the new age of the social web. I encourage you to play with these new social tools, see how they work for you personally then let me know what you think.

Tags: facebook, social media

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Conversion Rate, Ecommerce, Marketing, Persuasive Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.