Convert Visitors 
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When first landing on the homepage of an ecommerce store, it’s essentially make it or break it. In a matter of seconds, and within a comfortable scroll distance, an online shopper needs to make a personal decision on the quality, personal fit and overall appeal of the homepage.
So how can we communicate to an online shopper that they have now landed on an appealing online store with other active users and create a buzz effect that drives the shopper to engage with the catalogue? Let’s explore the “Live feed recommendation” to add social proof, interactivity, and a feeling of “buzz” directly on the homepage.
Using Social Proof to Fuel Live Feed Recommendations
People are essentially pack animals and given the opportunity, we mimic the behavior of others around us. Adding social proof is a tried and tested technique to motivate shoppers to spend their hard earned currency by placing the stories of other satisfied shoppers in the center of their shopping journey. Adding elements on the homepage that play on the social proof aspect, while simultaneously catching the attention of the user by means of interactivity and compelling products that spark an interest, means we have a clear winning strategy. This is why we came up with the “Live feed recommendation”, that effectively provides you with all of this and is just three clicks away.
‘Why Live Feed Recommendations’, You Ask?
Unsurprisingly, the crew here at Nosto are all very tightly integrated in the ecommerce community, and most of us are avid online shoppers as well. This leads us to constantly discover stores and evaluate functionality that helps us discover and convert while looking for new items. The initial idea for the “Live feed recommendation“ actually came from the massively successful online store NET-A-PORTER, which is a multi-global fashion store.
The underlying idea behind the “Live feed recommendation” is simple but effective. With one distinct element, we are achieving all of the following:
- Catching the attention of the shopper by a moving carousel, and adding a layer of interactivity through the use of arrow-like buttons and touch scroll on mobile devices.
- Delivering social proof by using a provocative title “Showcasing what the world’s most stylish women are buying right now”, referencing how many shoppers are online right now, and also exposing what products individual users added to their baskets.
- Further enforcing the social proof by exposing the geographical location of the users below the product that was added to basket by individuals.
What we wanted to do was bring similar functionality into the Nosto ecosystem and since we already collected all of the relevant data-points, we wanted to make it easy to set-up for any online store that wanted to leverage these same concepts.
We also wanted to showcase more data points than just “Added to basket”, so we added the full plethora of “Viewing product”, “Added product to cart”, and “Purchased product” to make the functionality as engaging as possible for the end-user.
Utsav Fashion, founded way back in 2000 is the world’s preferred choice for Indian Ethnic Fashion. The are currently leveraging the live feed recommendation together with their Instagram feed #myFashionUtsav to create a magnificent wall of social proof directly on their homepage.
For a different take on the live feed recommendation, take a look at the inspiring New Zealand-based Pia Boutique, that uses the underlying logic with a static template to manage a continually changing recommendation element based on recent views, add to cart, and purchase events with the goal of creating an ever-changing experience.
If military is more your thing, head on over to the French online store VET SÉCURITÉ where the Live feed breaks the design pattern from block style discount offers to the familiar product-based row.
The title loosely translates into “What customers are buying right now” and is a picture-perfect execution of both introducing social proof together with discounted items and showcasing top-performing items inline.
How to Deploy Live Feed Recommendations in Your Online Store
After introducing the Recommendation Gallery, we made it both easy to preview how the functionality would look with your catalogue and users – and usable with a simple three click method. This is how a preview in Helly Hansen Nosto back-end might look:
Deploying the functionality from here is easy. After clicking on the button, aptly named “Give it a try!”, you go through a quick wizard that copies the default template to the account and creates a pre-filled recommendation campaign that is ready to use as is, or easily customized depending on the online store’s requirements.
