Shoppable Images: How are they transforming the e-commerce landscape in 2024?

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Here’s an intriguing statistic to capture your attention: More than 3.2 billion images are uploaded on social media on a daily basis. 

Encountering this amount of content quickly saturates consumers’ overall attention spans, making it difficult, especially for brands, to stand out and get them to engage with this content. But there’s a catch: utilizing authentic content with engaging elements can push your consumers to take some action, per se, making a purchase. 

One interesting new trend that has specifically changed the landscape is Shoppable Images. 

Shoppable images have emerged as a game-changer, enhancing the shopping experience by making it more convenient and interactive for users. This evolution goes beyond simple transactions, reshaping how businesses connect with consumers. 

Before we move further, let us understand the definition of Shoppable Images.

What Is a Shoppable Image?

Simply put, shoppable images are visual assets, typically a photograph or graphic, including clickable elements or hotspots linked directly to e-commerce product pages, allowing viewers to explore and purchase the items directly from the image. 

These visuals can be individual photos or can be a part of shoppable galleries integrated at various touchpoints, such as home page, emails, or product pages.

When a user clicks on a specific part of the image, they are redirected to a product page or an online store where they can learn more about the product, view pricing details, and make a purchase.

Shoppable photos bridge the gap between visual inspiration and the purchasing process, creating a seamless and convenient shopping experience for consumers. They are often utilized in e-commerce, advertising, and marketing to drive engagement, increase sales, and enhance user interaction with products or services.

Importance Of Shoppable Images For eCommerce

Integrating shoppable images holds immense importance for e-commerce brands due to several key benefits. With this emerging digital era, audiences want more than just textual details. They prefer high-quality pictures and videos to get inspired and influenced. 

Images not only improve the appeal of the products but also induces consumers to take an action more confidently.

Shoppable photos enrich your existing images with prolific product details and descriptions and thus help drive engagement and sales.

Here are some key attributes:

• High-quality images provide better product information.
• Improves the overall purchase journey.
• Builds social proof through user-generated content.
• Social sharing of a large variety of product images.
• Turns inspiration into sales

Also, depending upon what your marketing strategy is, you may associate shoppable photos with various digital channels. Instagram shoppable photos, shoppable images Pinterest, Shoppable Images TikTok, or Social Shoppable Image ads are some examples.

These Shoppable photos provide the brands with ample benefits and are a boon to the industry. 

Now, we have learned about the importance of shoppable images and shoppable galleries. Now, let us understand their direct benefits for e-commerce.

Benefits of Shoppable Images For Brands

1. Shorten Purchase Journey

Shoppable galleries are extremely effective in improving the purchase journey and making it more convenient for customers to take an action. With shoppable images, users can seamlessly direct the customer to the purchase page through a streamlined path.

This feature is especially useful to leverage social content from platforms like Instagram more effectively on eCommerce businesses’ homepages and product pages. Brands nowadays face high cart abandonment rates. By integrating Instagram shoppable photos, brands can help customers purchase directly by clicking on the image, improving product discovery.

A shorter buying journey and an easy and quick checkout process with friendly payment options attract more customers and drive conversions.

2. Legit Advertising With Shoppable UGC

Nowadays, customers are more likely to trust the recommendation of a genuine user rather than the brand’s recommendations. They find more potential in the reviews of the general customer over any branded content.

To increase the product’s authenticity, brands are leveraging user-generated content in numerous ways. They are integrating UGC on various touchpoints and making it shoppable for direct boost in sales.

Brands integrate all the relevant Shoppable UGC with the shoppable tags displaying product details into their e-commerce homepage, product pages, emails or 

It helps in providing real and trustworthy images of the product, which adds credibility to the brand, creates social proof, and in turn, increases sales.

3. Rolls Into The Feeds of Shopoholics

With nearly 45% of the world’s population using social media, people are more attracted to the content on these digital platforms.

Source

Brands can take advantage of these “eager to buy” customers, by converting their social media feed into a shoppable through the best link in bio tool – Shopon.Bio.

 With a Shopon.bio store in the picture, you give the customers a small and easy way to shop for their favorite products simply through social media.

4. Strengthens Brand Sales & User Engagement

Shoppable images have emerged as a potent tool in the realm of e-commerce, significantly amplifying brand sales and elevating user engagement. By seamlessly integrating interactive elements into visuals, shoppable images offer a dynamic and immersive shopping experience. 

Users can engage with the image, interact with products they are interested in, and swiftly navigate to product pages for purchase. This streamlined process enhances efficiency and bolsters the likelihood of conversions. 

Moreover, shoppable images entice users through visual appeal, building a deeper connection with the brand and its products. Brands can strategically position products within these images, presenting cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

5. Improve Brand Visibility & Recall Value

When users engage with shoppable images, exploring and clicking on specific products seamlessly integrated into the image, they not only navigate toward potential purchases but also immerse themselves in the brand’s story and offerings. 

This dynamic interaction enhances brand visibility by ensuring that users actively notice and engage with the products showcased. Moreover, the interactive nature of shoppable images enhances brand recall as users are more likely to remember the products and the brand they interacted with engagingly and interactively. 

As a result, shoppable images become a powerful tool for brands to imprint their offerings in the minds of consumers, reinforcing brand recognition and recall, which is crucial in a crowded digital marketplace.

As discussed, shoppable images can bring so many benefits to e-commerce businesses, from improving the shopping experience to enhancing a brand’s visibility. In fact, if leveraged perfectly, this feature can be highly advantageous.

Let’s learn how to create shoppable images effectively.

How To Create Shoppable Images & Use Them

In this section, we will learn how to create Shoppable Images using Tagshop and publish them on e-commerce sites. There are two primary ways through which you can drive purchases from Shoppable Images. 

• By curating a gallery of shoppable images and publishing them on your website.
• By collecting images and hosting shoppable email campaigns with them.

1. Shoppable Image Gallery On Website

Tagshop is a dedicated tool that helps brands build trust, increase conversions, and grow sales by turning social media & user-generated content into Shoppable Content. 

You can effortlessly aggregate content from all the top platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc, through sources such as hashtags, user handle or tagged pictures. From the collected content, you can curate a gallery of social content and turn the posts into shoppable images simply by adding product tags.

To create Shoppable photos or images with Tagshop, you need to follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Create a Gallery

• Access Your Tagshop Free Trial Or Existing Account
• Create Your First Content Gallery by choosing your preferred social media channel and selecting a feed type such as a hashtag, user handle, or reels.

Step 2: Make Gallery Shoppable

• Now, you can turn your gallery shoppable by uploading your product catalog through your preferred platform such as Bigcommerce and Magento. 
• Or, if you are a Shopify user, you can simply enter your store’s URL to connect your shop and automatically sync your catalog. 
•  At this point, you can moderate your content gallery by filtering out the content you find irrelevant.
• Now, add product tags to the content and turn your feed into a shoppable gallery.

Step 3: Customize & Publish your Gallery

• Once done, customize your gallery by picking a theme and card style. You can also add a banner and CTA buttons to make it more engaging. 
• There are many more useful features like auto-moderation, profanity filter, responsive design, themes, CMS compatibility, etc., for enhanced performance.
• Finally, integrate your shoppable feed into your website’s home page or product page by generating an embed code via Tagshop and pasting it into your website’s backend.

2. Shoppable Images In Emails

Shoppable images in emails offer an innovative way to engage with customers and drive sales directly from within an email.

With Tagshop, users can effortlessly collect social content from social media platforms and host shoppable email campaigns. Let’s learn it step-by-step.

Step 1: Create a Gallery

• Access Your Tagshop Free Trial Or Existing Account
• Create Your First Content Gallery by choosing your preferred social media platform and feed type, such as hashtag, user handle or tagged images.

Step 2: Make your Gallery Shoppable

• Upload your product catalog through your preferred platform or upload your product catalog manually
•  Moderate your content gallery by keeping the relevant content in your feed and removing the rest. 
• Add product tags to the content and turn your feed into a shoppable gallery.

Step 3: Publish Email Campaign

• For the next step, choose the posts you want to include in your shoppable email. Select them and choose the layout of your choice.
• Once done, integrate your shoppable feed into your email by choosing your preferred email marketing platform, such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Omnisend etc., and launch your campaign.

Wrapping It Up

Shoppable photos have proved to be the marketing treasure for the brands in this digital media addict world. It has shaped the way of purchasing by narrowing the path from inspiration to purchase.

This helps the brands bring the shop to the users instead of users going there. This shoppable feature helps the brand to build a strong relationship with the customers. Also, it increase engagement, build trust, and improve sales.

Frequently Asked Questions