What Is Visual Commerce And Why It Matters For Online Retail?

The retail industry has been evolving continuously to cope with the ever-changing demands, tastes, and needs of consumers, integration of artificial intelligence & virtual reality, and swift service delivery to provide a superlative consumer experience.  Brick-and-mortar stores have alluring point-of-purchase product displays, store guides, and attractive ambiance. Real-time shopping possibilities make it a prime choice for consumers to shop over online retail. 

As consumers see shopping as a leisure activity and therefore expect a superior shopping experience from the retailer. 

Online retail experienced lesser engagement and conversions due to the unavailability of a wholesome consumer shopping experience. But in recent times, Online retail has grown exponentially to compete with brick-and-mortar stores (offline retail). 

Visual commerce, a recent phenomenon, has helped online retailers immensely in attracting, engaging, and converting more and more customers. But what is visual commerce and how it supports online retail?

Visual Commerce

Visual commerce is about creating and curating visual cues for a product/platform to make it more visually aesthetic and engaging. It is for the purpose of marketing and enhancing consumers’ experience in the shopping environment.

Visual commerce is an adversary to brick-and-mortar store aesthetics. It aims at shortening the shopping funnel for a customer in online retail by bringing the point of inspiration closer to the point of purchase. 

Through Shoppable visuals, high-quality user-generated visual content, powerful images, enriching infographics, engaging social media content, product description videos, and multi-angle product shots. AI & VR-empowered visual cues in online retail has developed an ecosystem of the augmented consumer experience. 

We have accumulated some facts as to why visuals are so essential to consumers

• Visual information is processed 60000 times faster than text.
• Instructions are followed 323% better by people when conveyed in visual form
• ⅔ of the people are known to be visual learners.
• Captivating images get over 94% more views than normal images
• Featuring videos on a website enhances conversions by 40%.
• 9 out of 10 millennial shoppers say user-generated content influences their purchase decision.

Source: Medium.com

Online retail & Visual commerce

We have identified a few areas through which online retail and visual commerce together are enriching consumers’ digital shopping experience. 

1. AI, VR & image recognition

Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and image recognition have been the buzzwords in the digital retail environment in recent times. These technologies are being implemented to make visuals more interactive and commercialized. 

These features help you to turn any piece of visual content into a shoppable catalog. Besides that, you can even directly see how a product from an online store would look on you or your home through artificial intelligence.

What this does is it enhances the discoverability, suitability, and shopping experience of the consumer through the ease of access, personalization, and minimum physical effort. 

This is one of the most accurate and impactful uses of visual content to harness the customers and increase conversion rate. 

2. Shoppable Posts

Shoppable posts are the posts tagged with a buying option for the products shown in that post which is linked to the merchandiser’s website where you can complete the checkout process.

Visual commerce can be best used for online retail through shoppable posts. Social media aggregation tool allows you to aggregate quality visual user-generated content, integrate shoppable element and re-market it on your website or various social media platforms. 

These tools help in selling the product in real-time, make your website look more visually attractive through social shoppable wall, easy product discoverability, and reduce cart abandonment & bounce rate.  

This is a great way to showcase social proof for your online retail store, amplify reach, attract consumers, and drive engagement that leads to better conversions.

3. Enhanced engagement & interactivity

We saw earlier how important visuals are for consumers, especially in their online purchase decision-making. Visuals provide a sense of security, authenticity, utility, and attractiveness to the users.

These features of visuals instigate consumers to interact and engage with your business/digital store. It has been a proven statement that visuals such as compelling photos, high-quality videos, gifs, and infographics get way more likes, shares, and engagement from users. 

And enhanced interaction and engagement with the business leads to building customer trust and loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, return visits, and better conversions. 

4. Understandable & expressive

Visuals are more easily and quickly understandable than text content. The phrase “A picture says a thousand words” is true in all aspects. 

Images and videos have the power to convey emotions more effectively. You can get the intended message across to the user impactfully.

Adding visuals to products makes it easy for users to understand how to use the product, assemble, fit, size, and realistic guide. It has been seen that session duration for a user increases by 340% on online retail where they have product videos and it also increases conversion by 127%.

Visuals providing a better understanding of the product with the intended emotions will save the customer from going to different platforms to conduct research and compare products resulting in better conversions and higher revenue.

To Conclude

With the emergence of technology, optimization, and handy social media aggregation tools and user-generated content. You can easily exploit the benefits of visual commerce for your online retail store and deliver a superior consumer experience.

The outcomes weigh much more than the minimal investment you will have to make for amplifying your business reach, user engagement, conversions, and sales.

Therefore, it is evident that visual commerce makes a huge impact on online retail. It is for you to decide how you want to use visuals in your business. 

Author Bio:-

I’m Alice Herman and I’m a digital marketer and technical writer. I’m passionate about exploring and writing about innovation, technology, and digital marketing trends.

Image Courtesy:Pixabay

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(Note:- This post is a guest contribution by Alice Herman. Read more about her in the author bio below the post)