What is Shoppable Content? Benefits, Types, and Examples

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The whole reason why online shopping picked up its pace so abruptly is because of the convenience that comes with it. Shoppable content is an important asset in this journey.

When customers come across high-quality visuals that can help them get a clear picture of a brand’s offerings, they tend to make confident purchasing decisions. Shoppable content can be in the form of branded content created by the business itself, or authentic user-generated content.

Shoppable content, in this, regard, is a popular content format. It allows customers to make their purchases from the content, without much navigation. 

As social media merges with online shopping, a new wave called shoppable commerce has emerged. We find consumers persistently browsing, exploring, sharing, and engaging with different forms of content to fulfill their shopping needs. 

But, let’s learn about shoppable content for better understanding.

What is Shoppable Content?

Shoppable content is any form of digital content, especially visuals such as images and videos, that allows consumers to shop the featured products directly from the content. This type of content is designed to streamline the shopping and selling journey of both, brands and consumers. 

For brands, shoppable content means social content such as images, videos or reviews collected from social media channels and turned shoppable. Brands collect content that features their products, and tag those products with checkout links, price, details, etc., so that users can buy those products directly from the posts.

For consumers, shoppable content allows them to instantly buy the products they find via social content. When customers come across engaging content (images, videos, etc.) they feel ignited to purchase the products displayed, they can instantly buy the product as shoppable content makes their purchasing efforts minimal.

It can be user-generated content or branded visual content. The idea is to merge the point of inspiration with the point of sale through content. Moreover, eliminating the buyer’s inconvenient journey from the product description page to the long-drawn ecommerce steps that take longer to reach the purchase page. 

Shoppable content makes things more immediate and result-driven, combining the browsing and shopping experience.

Benefits of Shoppable Content For Brands

Apart from connecting with their social network, billions of people globally browse social media platforms frequently to get inspired and explore new trends. 

Statistically speaking, social media has helped six in ten social media users to find new products and brands. But, that’s not all. Today, over 130 million Instagram users tap on shoppable posts to learn more about products every month. 

Consumers want inspiration, information, and shoppability at their fingertips (and in one frame). Shoppable posts or shoppable content perfectly ticks all the boxes.

That’s how important shoppable content is for eCommerce brands in 2024. But, there are various other benefits of this brilliant marketing tactic. 

Here are some of the key benefits that brands can garner by leveraging shoppable content in their marketing campaigns, online store, brand website, etc. 

1. Inspire Your Consumers

Inspiration nowadays plays a huge role for consumers when it comes to shopping. Consumers look for authentic inspiration that can help them understand the product quality and its value perfectly. Customers prefer subtracting out the guesswork and actually knowing how to efficiently put the products into action. 

2. Shows Social Proof

Leveraging user-generated content like real customer photos and videos could help in building the much-needed social proof. Consumers develop trust, and credibility and find authenticity through the content that helps them make favorable conversion actions. By turning this content shoppable, brands can encourage more confident purchases.

3. Seamless Shopping Experience

Longer shopping journeys, complex navigation, etc., are some key factors that negatively affect the shopping experience. Studies even show that an incompetent shopping experience can lead to an increased cart abandonment rate. However, you can make your shopping experience more seamless, quick, easy, and instant with shoppable media. By turning your social content shoppable, brands can enable users to make purchases quickly. 

4. Content Drives Conversions

The option to purchase the featured product instantly through content increases the chances of conversions. Moreover, shoppable content streamlines the purchase journey, where users can easily get information, engage with content, and instantly shop for the products they like.

Types of Shoppable Content for Ecommerce Brands

Let’s discuss the 6 types of shoppable post that you collect from social media platforms.

1. Shoppable Images

Shoppable images and photos are integrated with shopping features for the products displayed. Images are eCommerce brands’ most popular form of visual marketing to lure, engage, and influence consumers. 

Attractive images with a beautiful setting and product display could influence the consumers to purchase. With the help of various third-party tools like a visual commerce platform, you can easily create Shoppable images and publish them on your website.

This real-time shoppability could result in an instant conversion without the risk of cart abandonment.

2. Shoppable Videos

High-quality, engaging, shoppable videos are another great variety of social content. Videos are the most famous and interactive type of content available out there. 

Over 5 billion YouTube videos are streamed daily, with the possibility of escalating conversion by 80% through videos. In addition, brands can easily enable video shopping for the videos by embedding product links to buy the products featured in the video.

Users can get shoppable posts and marketing details for products in a dedicated video advertisement by brands. Besides, videos are shared much more than any other form of content, providing extended exposure and traffic to businesses.

3. Shoppable Articles

Articles and blog posts have a loyal audience. And this loyalty of the audience shows that the articles deliver valuable and informative content to their readers. 

Adding shoppability to an article is a great way to sell the products parallel to content engagement. 

A brief and crisp product discussion accompanied by visuals and instant capability will influence the viewers to make purchases.

4. Shoppable Magazines

Magazines have been a famous source of trending news and content in both offline and online space. Various brands add shoppability to product visuals in digital shoppable magazines. 

Magazines are known for striking visuals that inspire the readers, and adding buying option links to the products page would redirect the interested audience to the relevant product page.

Fashion magazines are a popular example of digital shoppable magazines.

5. Shoppable Social Media

Social commerce platforms have been at the starting checkpoint of shoppable content. Pinterest with buyable pins, Instagram shoppable posts marketing or Facebook shop are key examples of shoppable social media content.

Instagram Shoppable Posts

Shoppable Instagram galleries enable business profiles to create shoppable stories and shoppable posts using their built-in product tagging feature. Shoppable Instagram has various features spread across Instagram to tap into the users’ social behavior without interrupting their social activities.

Brands can turn their business accounts into shoppable content storefronts, and users can engage with their posts and buy the products in them by clicking on the product tags. Brands on Instagram focus primarily on visuals, and with the shoppable content features, they can use these visuals to increase their conversions.

Facebook Shop

Facebook has introduced the shoppable social media content feature, which allows users to tag products and buy them through posts. To use this feature, you need a Facebook business page and a product catalog. You can also run Facebook Ads with target audience-specific promotions.

The Facebook shop also delivers perfect customer relationship possibilities by allowing customers to contact brands directly from Facebook Messenger, bringing brands closer to their customers.

Linking social with commerce, i.e., social eCommerce, has made it a diversified shoppable content ecosystem. Many big brands are already reaping the benefits of this shoppability.

6. Shoppable Galleries

Shoppable galleries are collections of shoppable social media posts, such as videos and images, curated like a gallery and embedded on e-commerce websites so that visitors can explore the brand’s products, engage with them, and make purchases. 

These shoppable post galleries work as a captivating source of inspiration for users. Brands can use user-generated or influencers’ content so that users see how a product looks in real life, its aesthetics, or how the product can be helpful for them. This makes the content authentic and engaging, growing the brand’s conversions, engagement, and traffic.

See how your shoppable Content galleries look like:

12 Brilliant Shoppable Content Examples 

1. Ted Baker

A luxury clothing brand from Britain – Ted Baker, has launched multiple campaigns with shoppable videos. Ted Baker is a brand with top-end products, attention to detail, and a humorous side.

Ted Baker launched a shoppable posts-marketing video campaign with high entertainment value, engaging visuals, and interactivity. 

They reflected their brand values and identity through the videos impressively. Products were tagged as shoppable in the video that allowed the users to click and get more information, product description and buy the products shown in the video in real-time.

2. ASOS

ASOS launched a shoppable posts (photos) campaign, AsSeenOnMe and integrated two key factors: user-generated content & Shoppable posts marketing.

They encouraged their customers to share pictures of the products they bought from the website and share them on social media with Hashtag #AsSeenOnMe.

Then, the ASOS brand collected and displayed these user-generated pictures on its website under the following feature: Shop the look. Users could buy products from these UGC pictures from a shoppable link on the photo. 

3. Diesel

Diesel launched a hashtag campaign, #ForSuccessfulLiving, on their 30th anniversary. This global brand created shoppable videos with their models.

Featuring models doing catwalks in a video, the users can buy the looks or products during the videos by clicking on it, which is redirected to the product page.

4. Made.com

We have seen shoppable UGC fashion brands, but the brand Made.com is all about homeware and furniture. Its UNBOXED campaign features shoppable user-generated content.

The idea is to inspire users with how existing customers are using Made’s products. Along with the realistic and authentic UGC images, they embedded links to the featured products so that users can easily buy the products.

5. H&M

H&M, the leading global fashion retailer, is not behind in the race for leveraging shoppable social media. They have turned their Instagram profile into a shoppable content storefront. 

They tag products as shoppable on their Instagram posts so that users from their massive list of 35+ million followers can get inspiration, discover new products, and make purchases, everything on Instagram.

6. Net-A-Porter

Probably the most unique and perfect examples of social commerce is the use of shoppable magazine content by any brand. Net-A-Porter has combined a digital technology into offline media by turning their print magazine shoppable. 

The shoppable print magazine integrates digital and offline for users to buy their looks in the magazine. The idea is to install a Net-A-Porter app, scan the code in a magazine, and land on the product page where users can complete the purchase.

7. Kate Spade

Kate Spade New York is the perfect example of Shoppable videos featuring celebrities. In their partnership with Anna Kendrick, they introduced a campaign called #MissAdventure.

The videos followed the interesting lives of personalities in which they strategically integrated their products. At the end of the video, the viewers can shop the products featured in the video right from the list given there.

8. Joules

Joules, a fashion retailer of online shoppable lookbooks, are featuring engaging images tagged with the products. So, users can click on the hotspots in the image and add those products to their carts.

It is an excellent solution for online retailers and ecommerce brands to make the shopping experience delightful and sell more with these shoppable galleries and lookbooks.

9. French Connection

FC is a popular brand across countries that used shoppable lookbooks for their Spring 2014 and Spring 2017 collection. In the 2014 edition, the photos came with a “+” sign; clicking on that would lead to the product page. 

In 2017, they used a “Shop Now” CTA with images and product photos in their lookbooks to instigate purchases from the users.

10. Habitat

Habitat is a furniture and homeware store from the UK that used its “Habitat Blog” to leverage the shoppable posts and blog content. They create multiple blogs with the “Shop The Look” option.

It is an excellent marketing strategy where they delivered interesting information through blogs like “How To Make A Recipe.” In this, they nicely integrated their products and gave a shopping option at the bottom of the blog.

11. Wayfair

Wayfair uses Pinterest to sell its products and is an example of Shoppable social media. The shop section in the brand’s profile allows users to explore and buy products directly using Pinterest buyable pins. 

You need a Pinterest business account to be able to create a Shopping section. As Pinterest is a visually appealing platform, this gives the perfect opportunity to highlight shoppable visual content & products. 

12. Eureka Street Furniture

Eureka Street furniture is an online store for furniture shopping from Australia. They have created a Shoppable Instagram feed & shoppable UGC gallery on their website.

The shoppable Instagram feed features posts from their profile, and the Shoppable UGC gallery features user-generated content from brand hashtags and mentions.

Social shopping galleries help boost brand sales by inspiring users. They also lead to more engagement, build brand trust, and more.

Create a Strategy for Brands around Shoppable Content

Shoppable content is an effective marketing tactic that can help an e-commerce brand go from ordinary to viral. However, achieving this visibility can come only with the right set of strategies. 

The brands above are leading examples of successful shoppable content marketing, and there is one thing in common: utilizing an efficient third-party tool. So, you can say that among other strategies such as:

• Using social proof to instill authenticity.
• Leveraging user-generated content to boost inspiration.
• Prioritizing video content for better engagement.
• Making sure the product pages are well-optimized. 

Relying on an efficient, shoppable UGC platform is a must for eCommerce brands to experience the best results. Many tools like Tagshop are meant primarily for brands leveraging their social content and UGC to increase conversions. 

Tagshop is a leading social commerce platform that is already helping various brands to implement shoppable content effortlessly. 

Let us learn more about Tagshop.

How to Make Shoppable Content with Tagshop

Tagshop is a shoppable content platform that helps your brand make content, whether branded content or user-generated content from social media platforms, shoppable.

You can create shoppable content campaigns with a shoppable content platform through the following steps.

Step 1: Collect and curate branded content & UGC from 15+ social platforms

Step 2: Upload your product catalog & Tag products to content

Step 3: Customize your content feeds with personalization options

Step 4: Moderate content to showcase the most valuable content

Step 5: Publish shoppable content on your preferred eCommerce touchpoints like website homepage, product pages, and emails, etc.

Once your gallery is published, you can personalize it further by enabling features like product hotspots to tag multiple products, and other branding elements to enhance the overall look of the gallery.

Tagshop allows you to utilize your content and effectively turn it into conversions. It is a comprehensive social commerce platform for brands to leverage social content and build shoppable galleries ready to use on websites. Here are some more features by Tagshop:

• Enable Instagram Shop: Tagshop’s Shop on bio is an advanced feature that also lets you enable Instagram Shop without any limitations from the platform. Collect content and create an immersive link in your brand’s bio store on Instagram or TikTok.  
• Collect more UGC: Use Tagshop’s SnapUp to collect customer UGC without any mandatory social logins. Deploy QR codes on your gallery, allowing customers to scan and upload their visual reviews, ratings, etc directly. 

Collaborate with Creators: WIth Tagshop’s creator platform, businesses can achieve their marketing goals easily by discovering suitable influencers and collaborating with them.

Closing Statement

Any content marketing strategy aims to attract leads and increase e-commerce conversions through valuable and exciting content. And shoppable content hits the aim precisely and convincingly.

Shoppable content has brought a revolution by unifying content and commerce, which were in no way related to each other. Brands have been able to deliver a supreme consumer experience. In contrast, users have been able to consume and explore social and shopping at once with minimal time and effort consumption.

The evolution of shopping practices highlights the significant impact of shoppable content in today’s times. By transforming how consumers interact with your products, businesses take a crucial step forward in the ever-evolving landscape of commerce.