Page 23 - AdNews magazine Jul-Aug 2021

The shopping mall’s makeover
The proliferation of channels for brands to sell their products in has seen a new iteration of the shopping mall. The rise in marketplace options and social commerce have become ways for consumers to browse and “window shop”.
With every business able to become a commerce business — even those that weren’t traditionally considered to be — Davias says marketplaces have become popular choices. They alleviate many of the back-of-house pressures that come with having one’s own ecommerce store.
For Davias, social commerce further plays into the notion of headless commerce.
“If you’re leading ecommerce in an organisation and you’re focusing on your website, your mobile, your mobile app, it’s just another channel that you need to light up,” he says.
All of the social media and tech giants have begun to ramp up and invest more in their commerce offerings.
Facebook just announced an expansion of products which will soon be made available under Shops. This includes the expansion of Shops into its other channels such as WhatsApp and Marketplace, the introduc- tion of “Drops” and live-shopping events. Augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are being trialled to give options for customers to “try-on” products virtually and use visual search to find similar prod- ucts. Ads will also become shoppable with product tags and Facebook will use its knowledge of the shopper to send them to where it thinks they are most likely to make a purchase.
The announcement of these new products come as Facebook says it has more than 300 million monthly Shops visitors and more than 1.2
“The idea of just opening up a laptop and shopping
on a website is ancient. Shopping is everywhere and has to be plugged in everywhere.”
Accenture Interactive ANZ senior manager - digital strategy lead Peter Davias
Pinterest shopping features.
million monthly active Shops. Facebook expects this trend to grow, with 32% of shoppers glob- ally saying they plan to spend less time in-store after the pandemic.
Kate Box, director, global business group, retail ANZ for Facebook, says brands are no longer just fighting for discretion- ary dollars, but also discretion- ary time.
“That discretionary time is harder,” she says. “They want to win one of the 10 x 10-minute shops that we now do on our mobile phone.”
Facebook’s move to spend more on its shopping features is moving the social media giant and its other brands into a new era for social media. Box compares the move to becoming the “Westfield” of the digital world.
“Pre-pandemic, you still had boards and C-suites thinking of online as purely about conveni- ence, the shopper knows what
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