The recent explosion of social commerce is a stark reminder that shopping has always been a social experience that provides a wealth of opportunities for brands to score sales, and social feeds are quickly becoming the modern-day trip to the mall.
According to Adweek, the top 500 retailers brought in nearly $6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017. This is a big opportunity for the retail industry, because social commerce platforms give brands, both big and small, a way to capitalize on their hard-earned social media reach.
On the other side, today shoppers are influenced by social media recommendations, millennials who will soon be the major buying market are likely to make a purchase over social media, and shoppers will review at least one social media site before making a buying decision, so it makes sense to sell your products at channel that they’re going to research.
So, what is a social commerce platform? At its core, social commerce platform is a tool that will help online business owners to sell their products directly to their potential customers through their social media accounts. It’s a new way to streamline the buying process for customers and increase the efficacy of social media ads for brands. With social commerce features your users no longer have to go to the store to get the products that they want, because they can do it only with a simple chat.
That is why, based on this phenomenon one of our official partners Halosis has just released the latest version of their social commerce platform and offers a virtual assistant solution named Hana. This chatbot aims to help small businesses or SMEs to sell products directly through social media, receive orders, process all the transactions, manage product stocks without hassle, and respond to any questions or complaints from customers 24/7. Even if customers want to get in touch with admin, there is an option to connect with a human agent.
The good news is, with Hana it means the purchase journey will rarely take more than a handful of clicks, and your online store can provide faster, simpler, personalized services to customers through chat. This virtual assistant also can connect with a dashboard of your online store for inventory management system, to minimize customers’ complaints once the items are already sold out or out of stock. This dashboard sure will help entrepreneurs to recap all sales transactions in a better and effective way. According to Halosis data, in the past year their service has already helped all their partners to save up operational time up to 500.000 hours, and in one year there were 199.200 chats that generate 40.236 orders.
In enabling this social commerce solution, Halosis used Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology from Kata.ai. The collaboration between Kata.ai and Halosis is an example of how our technology can be leveraged by other companies. We want to democratize AI technology and become a PaaS (platform as a service) company for all kinds of business, no matter their size, industries, and segments including SMEs.
By releasing Hana, Halosis wants to empower Indonesian entrepreneurs and help small businesses grow further. And by targeting SMEs segments, Halosis offer their solutions in three categories : Free package, Premium package, and Enterprise package. In 2019, Halosis aims to reach 100 thousands SMEs and support women entrepreneurs who do online business, so they can do more and be more. In the future, Halosis will develop their virtual assistant capabilities, so Hana can give product recommendations to customers based on their purchase history.
In conclusion, considering over half of all shoppers follow brands on social media to view new products, there’s no denying the potential for social feeds to drive sales. This technology can help grow your offline sales as well. Because for one certain, social networks give you access to a highly engaged audience with sky-high purchasing intent.