Social Media Networks Advancing
One of the most important trends to be aware of for 2015 is e-commerce over social networks (s-Commerce). Social media networks are developing ways to handle payments without someone having to leave the network. They want to be your online wallet. They know that the shorter the path to conversion, the more likely is it that the conversion will take place. They want to handle the transaction for you, making the transaction the shortest path possible. They want the conversion to take place on their network so users don’t have to leave their site.
Payment Feature With Facebook
Time magazine recently revealed that Facebook has a payment feature hidden within the messenger app. This would work well with their auto fill feature that allows users to save their credit card info. This would also integrate nicely with their buy button, allowing Facebook users to make their purchases through Facebook. This would do away with the need to send the reader to PayPal, Square, Stripe, Apple Pay, or any other payment method of choice. This would also show an even greater need to integrate your website with Facebook and Twitter and be active on social networks.
Twitter Into One-Stop Shopping
Twitter has also gotten into the one-stop-shop market with its very own buy button. The button can be embedded into tweets so buyers can shop directly from the tweets themselves instead of being redirected to another site.
Others Joining Trend
Tumblr is also getting in on the social shopping trend with its very own buy, pledge, and get involved buttons. Users can post links from sites such as Etsy, Artsy, Kickstarter, and Do Something. In addition, Snapchat has partnered with Square to create Snapcash. Snapcash uses Square’s servers to let you easily send money directly to your friend’s back accounts, so making payments is faster and remains secure.
Social Shopping Here to Stay
With Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Snapchat just the starting point, you can bet the rest will follow and that social shopping is here to stay. Getting involved with social shopping is a smart move because you already have a network to sell to. It’s a live and active media network that’s a perfect platform for short term deals. The deal can be shared quickly and users never have to leave the network. It works because you can go where they are and you don’t have to entice them to go somewhere else.
Problem of Analytics Solved
Social shopping can help solve the issue of analytics. It can be difficult to track sales campaigns because you have to know where traffic came from. This is doable, but it can also get out of hand. This would let you track through the network instead of the entire web, making the analytics easier to follow and understand. This can help web designers and developers in several ways. For one, you will be able to receive payments through social networks. For another, you can develop systems for clients to connect their websites directly with their social shopping systems.
Quick Loading Sites Emphasized
Some design trends have been motivated by the need to make sites load faster and consume less bandwidth. Many of the trends more than likely came out of the need to reduce the size of the site and find ways to quickly load the site for those using mobile or tablet devices or those on slower networks. Site designers and developers are becoming more keenly aware of the weight of their sites and how their users interact with them. Responsive Web design has helped bring to light these concerns. Things like slow network speed (either on mobile networks or home ISPs) and device type have forced designers and developers alike to pay close attention to the size of their files and sites, how fast those sites load on different speed networks, and mindful of users and their situations such as limited data plans. It will be no surprise that the need to be faster and perform flawlessly with no lag time will drive design decisions on many new websites launching in 2015.