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By now, most direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands understand the importance of user-generated content (UGC) for marketing products. With the expected massive growth to social commerce, consumers will increasingly expect testimonials, reviews, style tips, and other shoppable UGC when discovering products online.
In fact, websites with shoppable UGC saw a 20% increase in return customers AND 90% increase in session lengths (source: HubSpot).
Despite its importance, many DTC brands have yet to implement a scalable solution for shoppable UGC for their eCommerce. Brands are losing sales without it.
Picture this. A shopper, who you’ve spent a ton of money trying to get to your site, is adding products to their cart. They then head over to YouTube or TikTok to see what real people or creators think of your products.
Boom – you’ve lost the sale. That consumer is now sucked into YouTube or TikTok and already forgot about their cart.
Shoppable user-generated content solves this. With it, consumers (1) have easy access to Reels, Stories, and TikToks promoting that product and (2) can also find additional tagged products easily.
What is Shoppable UGC?
Shoppable UGC refers to user-generated content like images, videos, reviews, style tips, and influencer posts that link to products. In most instances, the UGC is posted on social media platforms first. Then, the brand leverages software to integrate that UGC with eCommerce products to create a unique and engaging shopping experience for consumers.
Product tags or links are an essential component to making UGC effective. This allows consumers to easily find and purchase the featured products directly on the eCommerce site.
Why Shoppable User-generated Content is Important
The statistics pertaining to shoppable UGC are mind-blowing:
- A 29% increase in conversion rate (CVR) for eComm’s leveraging UGC
- 84% of millennial shoppers state that UGC on a brand’s eComm influenced their purchase decision-making
- Reviews and visual UGC critical – 64% say they actively seek them out before making a final decision
- 1/4 of search traffic for the biggest DTC brands are links to UGC
- A whopping 86%+ of companies are using UGC on their sites in some form
Where to add Shoppable UGC on eCommerce?
Shoppable UGC on the Homepage
Adding shoppable UGC to your homepage immediately greets a potential customer with social proof and inspiration.
Luxury furniture brand Serena & Lily dedicates a section of its homepage to featured UGC from its social gallery.
Clicking into a piece of content presents a modal with the creator’s name, a caption, and the Serena & Lily products featured. Shoppers can easily navigate to the products they want.
Shoppable UGC on Product Pages
Adding shoppable UGC to a product page can boost average order values by showcasing product variants or cross selling other items in a “look” or “edit”.
Women’s shoe brand Dolce Vita adds a shoppable UGC gallery to its product pages, beneath the add to cart button and above the dedicated reviews section.
Clicking into an image pops open a modal featuring the creator, the caption, and a link to any featured products.
For brands that sell entire looks (or bundles for industries that aren’t fashion or beauty), it’s the easy way to increase average order values by encouraging shoppers to add more products. The below example is a great example of a post strategically bundling several featured products:
Dedicated Creator Branded Storefronts
Dedicated ‘Creator Storefronts’ (co-branded creator landing pages) are becoming increasingly popular amongst eCommerce brands.
boohoo offers its influencers in the ‘boohoo collective’ program (powered by LoudCrowd) a dedicated creator storefront on boohoo.com. A creator’s UGC featuring boohoo from Instagram and TikTok automatically populates onto their personal page. Within the LoudCrowd Creators hub, the creator can tag the products on the Instagram and TikTok content featured on their storefront.
Then, when a shopper visits a creator’s storefront on boohoo.com, they can browse the creator’s favorite products and shoppable UGC images & videos. /
This boohoo.com Creator Storefront contains a dedicated tab for consumers to explore through shoppable posts only:
Most social commerce platforms require the brand to add UGC to their eCommerce and manually tag the products.
However, with LoudCrowd’s shoppable UGC solutions, the media automatically populates on the brand’s eCommerce site and the creators are doing the product tagging for the brand. This saves hundreds of hours per month for brands using shoppable UGC.
How Creators can Tag UGC in Products for your eCommerce through LoudCrowd
LoudCrowd enables brands to feature shoppable UGC automatically on their eCommerce sites. Unlike most platforms, LoudCrowd’s shoppable UGC solution leverages a brand’s creators to tag products in UGC on the brand’s behalf. Creators are incentivized to do this to boost the effectiveness of their creator storefront – where the shoppable UGC is automatically featured.
1. Influencer logs into their LoudCrowd | Creators hub
Creators manage their native creator storefronts, and therefore their shoppable UGC by logging into the LoudCrowd | Creators platform.
2. Influencer selects ‘Add Products’ under a UGC in storefront management mode
LoudCrowd’s integrations with Instagram and TikTok allows UGC from brands’ creators to populate on their native creator storefronts in real-time. This makes the process of turning UGC shoppable extremely easy for brands and/or creators.
After logging into LoudCrowd | Creators, influencers will automatically get prompted to tag products in their latest post featuring the brand. Creators can select ‘Add Products’ beneath the piece of content they’re interested in turning shoppable. They also have the option to ‘Edit Products’ in a piece of content they’ve already turned shoppable.
3. Influencer browses for the product to tag in the UGC
LoudCrowd syncs with an eCommerce’s product catalog so that creators can search for any available product. In the ‘Add Products’ modal, influencers can browse through products they’ve already added to their storefront, or add products via product page URL.
4. Influencer can copy a link that takes their followers directly to the new piece of shoppable UGC
After creating shoppable UGC, creators will have the option to feature and/or share the link to the new media on the brand’s website.
Creators can use that link in their social content to give shoppers automatic access to the featured products on the brand’s website.
Conclusion
Shoppable UGC galleries are becoming an expectation whenever a shopper visits your website. Luckily, there are ample examples for doing it right. Software solutions like LoudCrowd, Yotpo, and Baazarvoice have made it easier than ever to implement shoppable UGC galleries on eCommerce websites.
To learn more about how LoudCrowd can automatically populate UGC on your eCommerce site that either brand managers or the creators themselves can tag products in, chat with us.
