Social Commerce is a fast-emerging theme for anyone interested in social media, marketing and retail, especially. There have been some great blog posts about it in the past year - and in the past few months several fascinating social commerce reports have been released. Here are our picks of the bunch:
This excellent report from Bazaarvoice is packed with case studies, facts, quotes and figures, and it's well worth taking an hour out and reading through it. The wealth of case studies and interesting bytes of information is truly impressive - e.g. this from Argos' David Tarbuck on the store's use of online reviews: "We now have 900,000 reviews, and each week over a million customers read reviews" and this one "Restaurant reservations site OpenTable added the "like" button for its restaurants and sees a 25% increase in reservations and a 200% increase in member registrations at OpenTable.com".
The JWT Social Commerce report is also packed with valuable information. Ever wondered about the true value of "recommendations"? 72% of us already feel it's like Big Brother is watching us when we get personalised recommendations and 56% of us feel violated! The report is very readable with great visuals, but if you're pushed for time, scoot through the presentation, as recently highlighted on the excellent We Are Social blog.
Our 3rd social commerce report is from Havas Media Social and Lightspeed Research. They concluded that "whilst the industry is hailing social commerce as 'the next big thing', it is yet to make its mark on the overall bottom line with the majority (89%) of people not having bought anything on Facebook, and 44% not yet interested in doing so." It's from a survey of 1007 UK social networkers, so this seems valid, but we think the fact that 55% of people saying that they would "Check in" to a location to receive a discount, is a more interesting stat. See our 13 Key Social Commerce Statistics taken from the report.