Ecommerce has seen a dramatic shift from transactional buying to visual shopping experiences over the last few years. Consumers today not only respond to visual shopping experiences, but they also expect them. Social Media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok have shifted the ecommerce landscape and created the appetite for compelling product imagery and short-form video content that consumers have come to expect from brands and retailers.
Here are five examples of Visual Commerce ideas to inspire your ecommerce strategy in 2022.
Shoppable Scenes
Online furniture retailer MADE.com launched their ‘Complete the look’ room designer mid-pandemic when customers were confined to their homes, unable to visit showrooms for inspiration and to gain confidence in their purchases. With the lack of in-store experiences on offer, MADE sought to bridge the “interaction gap” and introduced their ‘Complete the look' room designer. It works by synchronising shopper data with correlated deep tagging to generate tailor-made room settings that feature selected items for each shopper, allowing cross-category sales around the anchor product. Since launch, they’ve seen customer interaction soar with customers who engage with ‘Complete the look’ spending 25% longer on the site and creating, on average, four customer room designs.
3D Space Planner
Luxury garden furniture brand Moda Furnishings launched the Fixtuur 3D Room Planner widget on a number of their product pages, which enabled their customers to design their outdoor space with Moda’s modular sofas and outdoor furniture, and view it in Augmented Reality. They also utilised the tool to enhance their in-store shopping experience, where customers could plan their space in the showroom with a sales consultant to guide them. Preliminary results showed Moda’s customers engaging longer with the website and the average order value increasing.
Guided Shopping
Algorithmic-guided selling is widely used and to great effect, especially during the pandemic, with customers needing assistance but being unable to visit stores. Perfume shopping is a sensory experience that is uniquely difficult to replicate online. Sephora’s Perfume Diagnosis recommends new perfumes to customers based on perfumes, brands and ingredients they already like. Sephora also uses the data acquired to build a profile of what its customers like and sends personalised emails to them based on their preferences.
Shoppable UGC
Car manufacturer CUPRA introduced content curation platform StoryStream, on their site, which integrates editorial and user-generated content into its communications and marketing activities. features two streams: ‘More reasons to choose a CUPRA Formentor’ – which curates PR-generated editorial reviews from media, and a curated social media stream, feeding user-generated and client-activated content. CUPRA has control over the curation and has used it to thread in their own tactical and promotional panels with bespoke calls-to-action to complement the third-party content. The results show that over 45% of website actions (test-drive requests, finance calculations, car configuration) come from users who have engaged with the stream at some point in their journey.
Detailed Product Experience
Online appliance retailer AO.com attributes some of its success to its investment in producing high-quality product videos. Their videos introduce new products, new features and new technology, as well as product reviews and how-to videos. They create video and multimedia content that answers every potential question a customer may have about a product, which keeps them on the AO site and not searching the internet for information elsewhere. Their detailed product videos provide a reliable and consistent source of information on the products they sell from various manufacturers. This consistency equates to customers who trust the AO brand, making it the go-to choice for shoppers in the market for new appliances.
