Shoppable Media Arrives For Retail Holiday Season

ChannelAdvisor

As retailers get into the thick of the holiday selling season, several emerging digital-first options are coming to the fore. Many of them capitalize on new platforms for social commerce and a relatively new concept called shoppable media.

With a new Chase Ink survey showing that 24 percent of small and medium-sized business (SMB) retailers are increasing their spend on eCommerce platforms, these new options could be an important link to consumers as they too move to the digital-first economy. However, infrastructure for capitalizing on the digital shift and advertising to capture it is critical and that’s where shoppable media can come in to the picture.

The concept is similar to social commerce, but has key differences. In social commerce, a consumer is interacting with an image or short message to link directly to a purchase decision. Think Instagram. When a shopper clicks on an image of Ferragamo shoes, social commerce takes the user directly to a link from which the shoes can be purchased. The interaction is based on a single image and influencer, and is somewhat limited in that regard.

Shoppable media provides more options and can be more effective for products that don’t lend themselves to attractive imaging. Suppose a CPG brand is introducing a new environmentally-friendly laundry detergent and it wants to include a major supermarket chain in its promotion. It can create a content campaign that discusses the importance of sustainable household products, place videos showing the differences in its new products and  even include a copy-heavy social campaign in the effort. By clicking on any one of these executions, the user can be sent to a product page on the retailers site for immediate purchase. The trip to the store is nullified; digital-first is the only option.

“Shoppable media helps bring in all the retail partners a brand has into the equation,” Mike Shapaker, CMO of ChannelAdvisor, tells PYMNTS. “It takes consumers from an ad to a place where they can they can buy. One way is through dynamic shopping links where there’s a lot that’s kind of automated behind the scenes. If  they don’t necessarily get a choice in there we can also pop in an interstitial into the campaign that allows upon that click and interstitial pops up, and it gives the consumer choice where it lists the retailers where the product is available.”

The shoppable media platform can also connect to marketplaces. For example, ChannelAdvisor worked with home improvement retailer Build.com, which had created and maintained several category-specific websites. After seeing success with the strategy Build.com knew the company was still missing potential customers on various marketplaces. Build.com began using the ChannelAdvisor marketplace platform to manage its product data feeds and listings, monitor product quantities and streamline fulfillment in one system and reach out to marketplaces with shoppable digital marketing and advertising strategies to allow the company to accelerate its online growth.

Shapaker sees shoppable media as part of the digital transformation brands and retailers have been accelerating since the beginning of the pandemic.

“I think about digital transformation in terms of a roadmap,” he said. “Not everyone follows the same path and it depends on the business and the category, but it’s important to have a roadmap. Maybe the first step in a digital transformation for a brand is selling direct to consumer. They may decide that a good first step is to look at all the channels that are actually selling their product online, and they’re going to optimize that. And they’re going to do that by understanding all the pricing, understanding product reviews, understanding all the content that’s out there, and then really working with my retail partners to optimize how my brand looks across all those channels. Then they need the analytics and the strategy to make it work.”