The Future of E-commerce is Media

We just kicked off day one of Traffic and Conversion Summit here in San Diego. 24SevenSocial is of course present and will be reporting as much as possible from the event. One of the main take-aways so far from the conference is the importance of owned media.

Especially in the e-commerce business, creating great content is getting crucial if you want to create a steady way of creating new customers. Where they traditionally just had a web shop and drove traffic via paid advertising directly to the sales page. More and more businesses have great success with creating their own sites where they create content, that in turn talks about the products they sell in a different way. And that actually generates better traffic that converts better – for less.

One example used in the presentation was the website Thrillist, a semi successful site that made their money via display ads. Thrillist bought the e-commerce website JackThreads which was a fairly successful web shop. They did not merge the brands, they did not change logos. They just kept both businesses as they were. The only difference was that Thrillist started sending more traffic via great content to JackThreads. Both businesses had a major boost in sales, and now over 80% of their revenue comes from e-commerce.

You can see the whole case study here.

Now, the main point here is that we all need to build up trust before we sell to people. Because it costs less, and the chance of them buying from you again is much higher.

All businesses needs to be more like media companies in 2015. The one with the best content will win.