The Success of #AmazonCart Requires a Change in Social Shopping Behaviors

A couple weeks ago Amazon announced #AmazonCart: a feature enabling Twitter users to add items to their Amazon shopping cart directly from Twitter. And with brands constantly looking for a way drive sales on social media, encouraging consumers to add items to their shopping cart without ever leaving Twitter could be a winner.
Indeed, there are quite a few brands that have successfully generated sales using Twitter. However, according to Patrick Sayler, CEO of social login provider Gigya, other efforts at social network-embedded storefronts have failed.

“The much larger opportunity for retailers and social commerce is in allowing shoppers to leverage their social network credentials on retail sites through technologies like social login,” he says.

Still, brands like Mountain Dew and Dickies are already giving #AmazonCart a try, as are their fans. In fact, according to social media analytics firm Simply Measured, #AmazonCart was Tweeted nearly 200,000 times since being announced two weeks ago. Of course, the early buzz resulted in lots of Retweets but the Retweets have since been replaced with mentions and @replies.



So far, the top Tweeted links have been books, include a romance novel. “This could be an amazing tool for publishers looking to reach and convert Twitter’s audience, which is basically on the network to consume content in one form or another,” according to Simply Measured.

While it’s a great idea to enable easier social commerce, these efforts are not without their pitfalls. Forbes contributor Lydia Dishman points out that consumers are growing more concerned with the security of their data. And with the “add it now, buy it later” concept, “there is the likelihood that the customer won’t actually make the purchase,” Dishman writes.

It could all be good data for Amazon though, which is probably the driving force behind #AmazonCart to begin with, according to Sayler. “One of the reasons Amazon has become the most prolific ecommerce company in the world because of its ability to understand and cater to individual customers - something apparent in it's highly targeted product recommendations,” he says.

In the end, Sayler says Amazon is taking on a huge challenge: trying to get consumers to shop on social networks themselves. So far, social shopping has been about tracking consumers to the sale on the retail site. “Getting consumers to change their shopping behaviours can be extremely difficult and consumer adoption will likely be a major hurdle,” he says.

 

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The Success of #AmazonCart Requires a Change in Social Shopping Behaviors