Southern Fried eCommerce Episode 17 Recap

Hey, y’all! Welcome back to episode 17 of the Southern Fried eCommerce Podcast from EYStudios. We’re back from our podcast holiday break and we’re ready to talk about everything eCommerce. This week our cohosts Jay Brimberry and Emily Faulkner are joined by our eCommerce Consultant/Sales Extraordinaire Supro Paul. 

Today’s episode began with a brief discussion of soup to accompany the snow coming to the south and then we moved on to talking about our favorite Christmas gifts. Emily got a King-sized bed with the hopes of finally being able to put enough space between her and her snoring boyfriend. We’re all about closeness here at EYStudios. Jay received some video games and is nearly finished with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy on PS5. Supro and his girlfriend had a productive Christmas in that they bought supplies for their new house like a fence. He also received a treasured framed copy of a newspaper celebrating the Atlanta Braves winning the 2021 World Series in addition to a copy of a newspaper from 1995 when the team won as well. 

After our opening remarks, Emily gave us a great rundown of our most recent blog posts. These are: 

We then started our deep dive into this week’s eCommerce news beginning with our first article, Adobe: Holiday eCommerce Topped $204B in the US. We’ve spent the majority of the last few episodes of this podcast talking about the holiday season and how to prepare for it and now the numbers are in. The article highlights that while spending was up this year, red-letter deals like Black Friday and Cyber Monday took a back seat this year with more consumers spreading out their spending than in years past. 

Some big numbers from the holiday season to note are: 

  • US consumers spent 8.6% more compared to last year
  • 23% of online orders this season were fulfilled via curbside pickup. On Dec. 23, curbside use peaked at 40%.
  • Out-of-stock messages were also on the rise with 253% more messages sent than in pre-pandemic 2019 and 10% more than in 2020. 
  • Buy-now pay-later options also continued to rise with revenue from this payment option resulting in 27% more than 2020 and 475% more than pre-pandemic 2019. 

Jay pointed out that he thinks the takeaway from this article is that a lot of these pandemic-related services like curbside pickup are here to stay. He cited his local Chick-fil-a as an example with more spaces in the parking lot devoted to curbside pickup than to regular parking spots. Jay asks Emily and Supro if they see a day in which eCommerce will take a back seat to in-person shopping again. 

EMILY: I don’t know, I want to go back to in-person shopping but I also understand that I’m an old woman and I’m different from most people. I don’t know. I’ll be really honest with you, I don’t know.

SUPRO: It’s too simple and too easy as it is right now. And I just don’t see people going back to getting in their cars, going in stores, and sitting there — sorry, standing there — for hours deciding on what they want to buy when you can do it from the comfort of your own home and have it all at your fingertips. I don’t see us ever going back. I see some benefits to going in-store but I think it will continue to trend to all online as we continue down this path.

And with that, we wrap up our discussion of the 2021 holiday season and as Jay points out, we’ll be back talking about preparing for the holiday season in 2022 come April. 

The next piece of news we’ll be discussing is a chart out of eMarketer displaying US Retail eCommerce Conversion Rates by Device. The chart shows that mobile devices are continuing to grow but that desktop computers are still the dominant device despite experiencing a drop to 3.7% conversion rate in Q3 2021 from 4.0% in Q3 2020. Mobile devices had a conversion rate of 2.2% in Q3 2021, up from 2.1% in Q3 2020. Jay asks Emily for her opinion on this chart and if it matches up to her experience with clients at EYStudios. 

EMILY: This graphic is really interesting and I wish they had the Q4 numbers in here because essentially what they’re saying from this information is ‘oh well it [the desktop conversion rate] went down to 3.7’ but if you go to Q4 of 2020 desktop conversion rate was at 4.5 so I’m sure it went back up yet again. And the mobile conversion rate is very consistent in pretty much the 2s. It’s funny I just had a conversation with a client this week talking about mobile vs. desktop. We’re running ads for them and based on the data we’ve been seeing that desktop is getting more traffic and desktop is getting more conversions. So our recommendation to the client was that we should really increase our spend for desktop and maybe lower mobile. And their immediate response was ‘well everybody’s on their phone all the time we really should boost mobile.’ And I think this data really clearly says exactly what we were trying to say in that it’s nice that everyone is on their phone. I’m on my phone and I look at things all the time that I might potentially want to buy but when I’m ready to make that purchase I actually go to desktop because it always has more information that I am looking for. Sometimes it’s harder to find the product details on mobile because they’re really hoping that you’re going to just immediately click to buy rather than actually deep-diving into the information that you need. Which has always been another of my many pet peeves. So, I think as much as everybody really wants mobile and viral shopping to be the number one we still just need to be mindful that desktop is still the number one: it is, as much as you don’t want it to be, it is.

Jay then includes a little disclaimer that this is just conversion rates and that there are a lot of other metrics that go into making decisions about where to invest. However, he says from his experience in the industry and just with his wife: mobile is where you go to scroll and scroll and scroll. You may think about buying it or save it on a wishlist but ultimately, he says, when you’re making a large purchase you’re going to go sit down at the desktop. Supro agrees with Jay and Emily about making actual purchases on his desktop:

SUPRO: The reason I really do that is I have some pretty fat fingers. I feel like sometimes I’ll click the wrong thing or maybe hit the back button or maybe scroll back to the previous page and it’ll just mess up my order in some way so I never really purchase anything off my phone. I also like to compare and do a little bit of hunting myself and hunting on a mobile browser is almost impossible to do. I like having side-by-side windows on my computer, which definitely helps out there. I’m just curious to dig deeper into this 2.2 conversion rate. Are people coming on to the website? Or are people using apps? I saw another article earlier this week about how voice commands are growing a lot more in eCommerce. A lot of sales have come back from a ‘hey Siri I need to buy X, Y, and Z’ and Siri will just take you to the first page that Google lists on there as well so very very curious to take a deeper dive into a lot of these numbers here. 

The last article from this week we discussed was Studies Predict Social Media Will Be Biggest Influence On Shopping For Decades. The report referenced in the article predicts that by 2025 social commerce will reach $1.2 trillion, up from a current $492 billion. The survey also found that 59% of respondents have made a purchase because of an influencer post and that ‘respondents report making more impulse purchases from social media than in-store shopping.’ The article also talks about the negatives of this trend with a staggering 45% of respondents going into debt to purchase an item they saw on social media. 

Supro himself has never been influenced to buy anything from social media but he says his girlfriend definitely has. 

SUPRO: She follows a ton of makeup gurus and influencers on YouTube and has definitely bought quite a few things from Sephora and other makeup brands just because they suggested it. They’ll have like product review videos, like 20-30 minute videos of taking a deep dive into foundation and mascara and all that makeup stuff and she ends up buying it more often than not. And another thing we’ve talked about, and I think Jay and I resonate with this, while we are watching TV I also watch Azure scroll through hundreds and hundreds of items as we’re watching TV. And I’ve seen her purchase those items from Instagram ads. They’ll come up between stories and she’ll click on them, it will just resonate with her, and she has a PayPal so it’s just like two clicks, and boom it will be at our doorstep in 2 to 3 days. So it’s definitely a very very easy way to buy things. I will say though, more often than not I find myself returning a lot of those things because she is just so caught up in the moment with the ad that when it does come in there’s like one or two things wrong with the dress to where it’s like ‘I might as well return it.’

JAY: Oh I hear you. That’s impulse buying and then buyer’s remorse. They don’t even talk about that in this article. Look at us, we’re adding something new to the conversation! I think that’s a great, great point, Supro. When you buy things impulsively — responsible people anyway and not everyone is responsible — ​​you’ll look back on it later and go ‘why the heck did I buy that?’. There was a time not too long ago where I felt like I was going to The UPS Store and to the FedEx store and wherever returning things every other day, so yes, I’m with you there.

Jay then asked Supro if his TikTok famous siblings are engaged in influencer marketing. Supro said no but that his brother has been approached to include musician’s tracks in his videos for a few hundred dollars. There was then a brief discussion about whether Emily or Supro had more famous friends and Jay stayed quiet. He then asked Emily if she’s ever been influenced by influencers on social media. 

EMILY: I am not influenced by influencers, I am influenced by ads. Because I get the most targeted ads that are always exactly what I have been pretending that I need. I’m like ‘oh it said I need it, gotta get it.’ I actually was having a conversation with Ivonna — she has also been on the podcast and is our Runway head if you will — we were just having a conversation yesterday about how she follows a makeup influencer and she posted about her favorite things from the company ColourPop. And Ivanna on a whim went on their website and found out they were doing a 25% off sale and spent well over $100 on makeup. So she and I were laughing about how impulse purchases kind of lead us to really overspend everything. But then the influence of that person has her talking to me about it and I then went to this girl’s page. She was actually collaborating with ColourPop where ColourPop actually had a landing page of the products that she recommended on the website. So I’m on their website, Ivonna’s telling me what she purchased, I was simultaneously loading up those product pages and then I started adding things to my cart. So that’s the really fascinating thing about influencer marketing is it expands well past the one person that showed it to you, it branches out from there and it can really be detrimental to my wallet.

Jay is not one to be engaged with influencers but he said there’s still value in this article even for smaller businesses that aren’t Walmart or Amazon. 

JAY: You can read this article here and think I’m not going to be able to go out and get Tik-Tok influencers…but, you don’t need those guys. A lot of people don’t care to hear from the Jason Derulos of the world or whoever it might be. Maybe Tom Hanks is the only celebrity I would care to hear from. But you can create your own content and if it’s fun and if it’s engaging and if it’s hitting your market and if you know how to get it in that market and social media does open up and that’s what this article is about. And I hope it gives you hope, social media does open up avenues to where you can be transported right into your consumer’s home, right into their pocket, right into their life wherever they are, the train, the car, wherever. Producing content that piques people’s interest can go a long way. Now listen, here’s the Catch 22. Your content has to be good. And we’ve seen this before with some of our clients and with other folks out there. You don’t want to produce content and you’re just like, ‘what are these folks doing?,’ ‘this is sophomoric,’ ‘this isn’t great looking,’ ‘this is not something that I would hang my hat on.’ You have to make sure that it’s curated. And, listen, there is trial-and-error, I mean, you want to continue to get better at this. But it has to be the type of content that people are looking for. 

Jay then wraps up the show by embarrassing Emily by asking about her latest impulse purchase which just so happened to be a sequel to a demon romance book she just finished reading. Jay quickly moved on and reiterated that social media marketing is for everyone, not just people that can afford big-time influencers. 

We ran a little short on time in this episode so do check out these additional eCommerce news articles from this week:

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