Shoppable stories

Motivating people to interact with your online store is often difficult. On the one hand, you want to make your store stand out, and gain attention from an otherwise uninterested viewer. On the other, you don't want to make your store seem too pushy, as modern viewers are likely to actually ignore it. So how are you supposed to find the thin line between being too notable, and not being notable enough? Well, shoppable stories present an interesting solution.

What are shoppable stories?

Shoppable stories are web stories that allow you to access an online shop directly from them. This can be an offer for a specific product. The ability to tag products for future purchases. Or it can even simply guide people to their cart within an online store. Simply put, a shoppable story is a story that directly aids you in your shopping and brings you closer to a specific online store.

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When used properly, a story can easily bridge the gap between what the user is currently interested in and your store. What makes this possible is the variety of design choices you have when creating a story (whether web or in-app). And, the innate attention-grabbing quality that story content seems to have.

How to use them

At first glance, it may seem that web stories are only suitable for social media platforms. But, this simply isn't the case. Yes, social media platforms are where we naturally expect to see story content. This is why they have designated sections for it. But, we are here to show you that you can easily and effectively incorporate shoppable web stories in any area of marketing. What's important is that you understand the context and that you understand the role that web stories are supposed to serve.

Examples

To give you a better idea of how to use shoppable stories we will go over a couple of examples. These should illustrate how versatile web stories can be, and how effective they are in guiding people to your online store.

QR codes

Let's say that you run a company where selling products isn't your main focus. Yes, you do have some products to offer, and you have an online store where your customer can make their purchase. But, most of your business is service-based. So, how can you naturally recommend products to your customers without breaking the experience they have with your company? Simple. Use QR codes. By placing QR codes next to your products, you can enable your viewers to learn more about them and even purchase them in your online store. You can easily have the QR code lead to a shoppable story. That way, the customer can inform themselves at their own convenience.

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All in all, QR codes are a great way to connect the digital world with the real-life experience your customers will have. So, we strongly recommend that you consider them as an aspect of your marketing.

Dynamic widgets in websites

The great thing about web stories is that they can be dynamic. What this means is that the content within the web story doesn't have to be static. By using web stories instead of standard content, you can look to tailor them according to customer preference. If you are familiar with your customer base, you can find ways to separate them into different groups and offer the right product through a shoppable story.

As you can imagine, not all customers will be interested in the same product. And if you wish to gain their interest, you need to be able to offer products that they are likely to find interesting. This process is called personalization, and it is as important for marketing as it is for sales. Fortunately, web stories go well with personalization. They allow you to automatically promote the right products to the right customers. Seeing that you can easily export web stories as widgets, you will have a fairly easy time incorporating them into your website.

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In-app recommendations

Another way to use story content is as an in-app recommendation. Similar to websites, story content can find its use within the context of an app. Especially if your app isn't focused on selling products, but on providing a specific service. Again, it is necessary to understand what your users are like, and what they are likely to prefer when it comes to products. Shopping recommendations are just as much about content as they are about timing. So, it is important that you understand the journey that your user has within your app, and that you time your recommendation well. Using properly your in-app recommendation will be seen as a helpful tip, not as an obnoxious push to sell merchandise.

Easy access to the cart

In some situations, it is best that you don't take your users out of their experience. Be it a website or an app, it is best to let them enjoy your content. The trouble is that during their enjoyment of your content comes the best time to recommend products. And if you simply guide them to your shop, your risk them losing the train of thought that had them enjoying your brand. So, what are you to do? Well, a neat way to use shoppable stories is to simply allow users to add items to their cart. That way, you won't yank them out of their experience.

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You can even allow them to tag a certain product, and come back to it once shopping naturally comes to their mind. Having a well-developed shopping cart system is necessary for any online store. As you can see, shoppable stories can work well within the framework of a non-intrusive shopping cart system.

Why shoppable stories stand out from the crowd

Why should you use story content among all other types? Surely by now, you are familiar with a certain type of content. So, why go through the trouble of researching, designing, and using shoppable stores? Well, both in-app and web stories go well with personalization. Due to their dynamic nature and the variety of design options, you can personalize a tremendous amount of any story.

Secondly, web stories gain customer attention. In the modern era of online marketing, customers are sick and tired of standard marketing content. So much so that most will actually ignore any type of content that seems to be trying to sell them something. Well, story content, for some reason, gets a pass here. If you create a decent web story, people won't even notice that it has a marketing purpose until they are halfway through. By that time, they've already decided whether they are interested in your brand or not. So, web stories do serve a unique role in modern marketing. At least for now.

Finally, modern platforms like StorifyMe allow you to create any kind of shoppable story that you would like. You can even integrate Shopify with it with surprising ease and connect your website to your Shopify store in a couple of clicks. Therefore, all things considered, you really ought to at least try using web stories. We are sure that you'll be pleasantly surprised.