Trend Snapshot: Buy Buttons

This Trend Snapshot includes:

Trend overview

Buy buttons are spreading rapidly across websites and mobile apps, giving consumers the chance to acquire products directly from their current digital location rather than moving to another platform, while also letting brands "close the loop" between discovery and purchase.

The principle behind these tools will be familiar to most shoppers, as they operate on similar lines to the "one-click ordering" – which automatically processes and ships orders at the touch of a button – used by ecommerce vendors like Amazon. The primary difference takes shape behind the scenes, as tech firms can now provide such solutions throughout the digital universe, to clients large and small.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of buy button:

  • Walled gardens: these buttons enable people to register payment details and make purchases on a specific site, promising enhanced convenience and a streamlined experience. The main downside is that users have to save their information separately on each platform.

    • Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram are all exploring this area, eyeing benefits such as keeping users firmly on their pages and boosting ad revenue. Google has also unveiled "Purchases on Google", letting visitors acquire items straight from its mobile search ads.

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  • General purpose: the tools in this category work on any platform displaying the appropriate button, which thus become "acceptance marks" in an equivalent fashion to credit-card logos at checkouts in bricks-and-mortar stores. They may, however, be excluded from the "walled gardens" where consumers are spending much of their time online.

    • The current options include Express Pay from American Express, Visa Checkout – which boasts five million registered users – and MasterCard's alternative, called MasterPass. Also in this group are buttons that once fell under the "walled garden" rubric, like PayPal and Amazon's "Pay With Amazon".

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One driver behind the adoption of these buttons involves translating increased mobile browsing into actual shopping, as many consumers remain worried about data safety, grow exasperated by making repeated errors when entering information on small screens, or struggle with systems not optimised for wireless devices. In response, most abandon purchases or undertake them later on a desktop PC.

Whatever route they ultimately choose, people are considered more likely to finalise transactions if they can stay on the site or app they are currently using, rather than being redirected to another destination. In the words of Patrick Collison, the ceo/co-founder of digital payments service Stripe, the objective is to "flatten the funnel so everything is right there at the point of discovery".

Juniper Research, the insights provider, suggests that moves by social platforms to become direct-sales channels in this way will be a "strong fillip" for online retail revenues, which should leap by 17% to $1.7 trillion worldwide this year. Another bullish perspective came from digital analyst Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.

"Buy buttons will increasingly be rolled out. They minimise the friction to purchase at the moment of interest," she asserted.

Not all observers are equally enthused. Sucharita Mulpuru, vp/principal analyst at Forrester Research, believes the buzz surrounding buy buttons is "premature" at best. "I don't think we'll see a major shift in how shoppers buy anytime soon, at least not with the executions that have been announced to date," she said.

"Merchants that are intrigued by these offerings are wise to test and learn but to have low expectations."

Further challenges include integrating inventory and payment systems between web platforms with little experience of selling products and retailers unused to functioning outside their own physical stores and branded websites. Ensuring items are in-stock and shipped on time, for instance, could pose sizeable hurdles.

Despite this, various brands are already attempting to leverage these tools to increase sales.

Brands ahead of the curve

Trendsetters don't come much more influential than Apple, the electronics giant. And in August 2015, the company added "buy buttons" to its own walled garden, allowing consumers to make purchases directly from the Apple.com domain and removing the separate "Store" tab it previously employed for this purpose.

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As a result, the "whole site" now represents an online store, freeing visitors from the need to access a discreet hub – namely, store.apple.com – having browsed the devices on offer and decided on a purchase. "We redesigned Apple.com knowing that our customers want to explore, research and shop in one place," a spokesperson from the Cupertino-based organisation said.

While people regularly buy electronics via digital channels, that does not hold true for cookies and chocolate. But Mondelez International, the manufacturer of brands like Oreo and Cadbury, has still allied with ecommerce specialist ChannelSight to add "Buy Now" buttons to owned, earned and paid-media platforms – and linking to 130 retailer websites – in 25 nations.

This followed a pilot in 20 markets with 100 retailers, and reflects the firm's positive outlook on ecommerce. "If we can begin to take the ad and show that this person actually has these real attributes, and actually then connect it to a buy, it can transform our ability not to just target, but to measure, to track. It can the change the way we do creative," said Bonin Bough from Mondelez.

In the social space, department-store chain Macy's was among the first partners which signed up to test the "shoppable Pins" which Pinterest is using to enter into the "buy button" race in the US. This feature is initially restricted to the iPad and iPhone, but will be rolled out on Android devices and desktop in the future.

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"When customers are on Pinterest and they are being inspired, it's a new and different way for them to interact and get to know the Macy's brand," said Serena Potter, group vp/Macys.com. "It's a great way for us to find new customers and to introduce existing customers to some of our other products."

Having begun trialling a "buy" button late last year – an effort that attracted partners like Burberry, the luxury brand, and the Home Depot, the DIY chain – Twitter is now greatly expanding its endeavours, too. More specifically, the microblog is working with Shopify, an ecommerce site that runs online retail services for 100,000 merchants, to dramatically ramp up its prospective reach.

While Pinterest's program prioritises consumer discovery, Twitter's approach could allow clients to more proactively promote selected products and deals.

What it means for brands

Andy Radovic, regional director/digital (APAC) at Maxus, argued the appeal of buy buttons to marketers is simple: "It gives them the opportunity to create even more transactional relationships with their users. These buy buttons will enhance any brand's e-commerce program by simply providing a streamlined mechanism to buy."

His guidelines for operators eager to tap this resource included making sure the experience is mobile-optimised, as well as striking a balance between organic content and pushing for purchases, as saturating sites with buy buttons threatens to alienate consumers. "Everyone isn't going to want to see their feeds flooding with these buttons," said Radovic.

Several Asian countries, he continued, could prove to be fertile ground, as digital connectivity often outstrips retail development. "Particularly in some markets that have a high population of rural residents – like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines – I would see buy buttons as a strong platform to finally connect brands with these disparate, hard to reach communities," he said.

Danielle Bailey, research director at L2, drilled down into the prospects for social commerce, and whether any evidence to date had unequivocally demonstrated that consumers want to shop on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. "The fact that no brand has yet to proclaim their newly installed buy button as a definitive success suggests they don't," she said.

"Another hurdle to buy buttons' success," added Bailey, "is the lack of a unified payment system. In the absence of a one-click method that works across all platforms and retailers, social commerce will never be completely seamless. Most social media activity takes place on mobile now, and having to enter a form of payment on a mobile device is especially difficult."

With brands typically having fought very hard to build engaged communities on these properties, an overly-aggressive approach risks turning their posts into display ads, not conversation pieces, too. "Therefore, all efforts related to buy buttons should be very targeted and very subtle," said Bailey.

Building on this theme, Adam Padilla – president/chief creative officer at BrandFire – proposed that the use of buy now buttons be planned as carefully as the placement of a checkout in a retail store. "The 'buy now' button almost serves as a store clerk that is ready to take your order. And you want that around when you're ready for it," he said.

"The opportunity really lies in the marketer utilising the buy button in a way that does into feel like it hinders the customer experience. In fact, instead, it accentuates the experience or amplifies the experience and adds convenience … as opposed to coming across as a hard sell."

As a starting point, brands may benefit from conducting trials with a few hand-picked products. "Rather than setting up 25 SKUs, maybe try to set up three of four. Test your marketing techniques; test how things are working," Padilla recommended. "Show a little bit of restraint at the outset just to test the waters, get some user feedback, and then … you can ramp up your offering."

Looking ahead, he predicted that the real power of buy buttons could emerge once they intersect with precise consumer targeting, where brand messages reach shoppers known to be interested in a given product. "Every single one of those ads will only be served to people that are warm leads – that already have been shopping for something," said Padilla.

"The big question is: will marketers be able to show the restraint to utilise this information in a way that has that soft-sell mentality?"

What can we expect

Brands, website owners and tech providers must address various issues if buy buttons are to reach their full potential. Looking at social media, image-sharing sites like Pinterest and Instagram may seduce users into buying with attractive imagery, but will have to ensure pictures remain linked to actual inventory in the long term, or else cease to be marked as "shoppable" at a certain point.

Another problem – especially for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – is that posts have an extremely short shelf life, and can easily be missed or ignored as they pass through a user's cluttered feed. The Holy Grail will perhaps involve finding ways of prompting recommendations between consumers, as word of mouth could yield greater engagement and purchase intent.

Using paid-for solutions, like promoted tweets or display ads, may help brands draw attention to their new buy buttons. But the lower engagement rates recorded by commercial messages compared with organic content could be a disincentive here.

Doubts also exist concerning whether people want to use social sites to research and purchase. That means a company such as Google is relatively well-placed, as its search portal typically represents a gateway to both of these activities. Should its "Purchases on Google" mobile test be extended onto desktop, the long-term prospects for buy buttons could become clearer.

Amazon, too, occupies an enviable position in this space, as it has unparalleled expertise in all aspects of the e-tail process, from processing orders to expedited shipping, alongside high levels of consumers trust, giving it a significant advantage over most competitors.

By contrast, manufacturers and merchants boasting less experience in digital sales will need to consider whether they have the necessary systems in place, with inventory, payments, distribution and customer service among the main factors. The complexity of these areas ought not to be underestimated. Firms that already possess ecommerce capabilities should thus be in the box seat.

Just as some companies are a more natural fit than others, marketers must carefully assess if their target audience is likely to utilise buy buttons. Many snacks made by Mondelez International, for example, are impulse choices appealing to a young audience, but online purchasing in this category has been minimal to date. Testing and learning seems like a sensible approach in this context.

Particular countries present stronger opportunities, too. In nations where the organised retail sector has a restricted penetration, for instance, consumers have willingly adopted new tools for transferring money and making purchases, and might find buy buttons equally alluring.

Wherever buy buttons do take off, they will supply brands with a chance to shrink the gap between learning about products and acquiring them to almost zero. Such a process, additionally, promises to yield valuable data covering customer habits and preferences, as well as offering measurement signals regarding which channels are viable sales outlets.

For website owners, the opportunities may come either in sharing revenues from sales made by their brand partners or developing new ad formats that deliver higher conversion rates, as shoppers can simply buy products.

Next steps

  • Start small and restrained – decide when a 'buy button' might be appropriate for your brand and its customers, and be careful not to disrupt the consumer experience on a website.
  • Consider if a "walled garden" approach – for example, on a brand's dotcom site – is an attractive option, or whether a general purpose solution may be preferable.
  • Review your existing e-commerce infrastructure, and the extent to which it can be integrated with direct-to-consumer sales on first-, second- and third-party platforms.
  • Identify the countries where consumers may be the most open to use buy buttons, both in terms of digital habits and the structure of the retail market.
  • Assess the quality of customer data. Are you able to target 'buy buttons' so that they appear only to warm leads?

Further reading

This trend relates to the following themes or ideas, drawn from Warc's Index and Topic Pages: