What Is Visual Commerce And How Will It Benefit Your Brand?

Visual commerce the practice of leveraging compelling visual content and augmented reality to better showcase your products and improve your customer shopping experience.

Convenience, practicality and an easy shopping experience. These are the three main things that consumers are looking for when shopping online. With the evolution of mobile technology along with the tsunami of visual social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, consumers have come to expect and prefer engaging visual content when shopping online.

In the world of social commerce, virtual events and live-streaming, retailers now have an endless list of opportunities to target and engage with their customers. In reaction to the wave of new ways to consume brands, there’s been a noticeable shift in how eCommerce stores use visual content and implement their marketing and eCommerce strategies.

It’s what the industry is calling visual commerce. Now, it may just sound like another marketing to eCommerce agency buzzword, but it is far from it. The goal of visual commerce is simple: create compelling visual content to attract, influence, and convert consumers. The world may never shift back to the brick and mortar army, so the way you display and present your products online needs to be interesting and compelling. 

Visual commerce is one tried and tested way to stand head and shoulders above your competition. But how can you get started and improve the user shopping experience through visual commerce? As a leading eCommerce agency, we know some great ways to get started.

The basics of visual commerce

Let’s start with the basics of visual commerce. This term can cover a number of media and creative formats. Brands can employ a mixture of pictures, videos, virtual and augmented reality to showcase their products and consumers learn about and connect with their products and brand. 

Visual commerce is a broad term that includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Showcasing your products through high quality images, videos, GIFs, 360* views
• Making your visual content searchable with the right descriptions and tags. These will help consumers easily search and discover products on your site
• Collecting and displaying user-generated content on your website and social stores
• Employing shopability tools to your content, so shoppers can click on a given image or video and be instantly directed to the right product page

Recent studies suggest that visuals are processed 60,000x faster than texts. This, combined with the ever-growing pressure to make shopping experiences unique and seamless, It gived brands a great opportunity to enhance the visual aspects of their online store. Ecommerce site developers and marketing agencies around the world are urging retailers to build and incorporate compelling product photos, videos, and in-action shots for their product pages and overall eCommerce platforms. 

In short, visual commerce uses creative visual mediums to guide consumers through their shopping experience, improve product insights and give users new platforms to shop. 

In the last few years, the importance of visual commerce has been vastly accepted and the top brands within the retail industry have developed incredibly influential ways to include visual commerce at every stage of the shopper journey, from awareness right through to conversion.

What are the benefits of visual commerce marketing?

In a nutshell, using visual commerce as a marketing tool can help break down barriers that are preventing customers from converting, making them more likely to purchase from you instead of taking their business elsewhere.

That was the short answer. Now, here’s the long one.

We, as consumers, have reached an unparalleled new age of shopping. Our shopping journeys and habits differ in many ways from those of past generations. Through social media, hyper-targeted advertising and social commerce, we have more brands and more avenues to buy than ever before.

Through platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, we are able to get a glimpse of new products and trends without even having to go out of our way to shop. It is common for shoppers to research potential purchases with the help of YouTube product videos, and we are even hounded with promotional offers on Snapchat and TikTok. 

In this digital universe we find ourselves in, the biggest obstacle retailers must overcome is that people can’t actually touch your products, or see them up close and personal. This means that good brand reputation, trust and insightful product visuals are more important than ever. 

The key to selling online is making your customers see who they’d be with your product in their life – and if the only thing your customer has to look at is a few pictures of the product on a block colour background, then how can they visualise owning it for themselves? 

Social media has had a big effect on marketing and eCommerce efforts around the world. As of September 2017, Instagram reported that the platform had more than 800 million monthly active users that post more than 95 million pictures and videos per day. It is important to know that these aren’t just organic users. Much of this content comes from brands and their customers posturing on their behalf. 

“Instagram reports that 60% of people say they discover new products on the platform” – Facebook IQ

And Instagram is just one social media platform that influences our buying habits. Collectively, more than 2.7 billion people use Facebook, Snapchat and X at least once a month. In result, brands need to use these influential platforms to leverage their own visual content. This will allow them to discover and engage with compelling content from customers.

Should visual commerce marketing be a key consideration for my brand?

If you operate an ecommerce brand, visual commerce marketing is fast-becoming an essential, not a nice-to-have. In order to set your offerings apart from your competitors’, quality images and video are an absolute must – especially if you’re aiming to reach a younger audience via platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

If you want to keep up with the next wave of online trends and not find yourself falling behind, you need to have a visual e-commerce strategy that works for you. This is where an experienced eCommerce agency like Brave comes in. 

With more than 25 years of experience collaborating with growing ecommerce brands across the UK, we know how to create bespoke, user-focused website designs and UI improvements. To scale up your eCommerce processes and experiences, get in touch with us today.