The Overseas Rise of Social E-Commerce: Miniapps Help Create Super Apps

The Overseas Rise of Social E-Commerce: Miniapps Help Create Super Apps

In 2022, social networks are trying to bring the tools that were once only available to brand owners to influencers.

Social e-commerce has been a lively topic in recent years. As the Internet e-commerce traffic bonus diminished and the growth of traditional e-commerce slowed, a number of social e-commerce platforms, represented by Xiaohongshu, TikTok, and AAuto Quicker, quickly emerged in China. Following closely behind, the Chinese wave of social e-commerce has led to the development of global social e-commerce.

In the report “Social Media Trends in 2022” jointly released by HubSpot and Talkwalker, several overseas social media trends are worth noting.

TikTok has risen: TikTok broke overseas app download records and became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide.
The number of new social media users worldwide has been over 500 million, up nearly 14% year-over-year. It has to be said that the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified social media usage around the world.
The era of mature influencer marketing has arrived. The research of Influencer Marketing Hub in 2021 reported that 67% of respondents used Instagram for influencer marketing.

In short, there are new social platforms, new user growth and new ways of social marketing for social networks.

Challenges and opportunities coexist when overseas social e-commerce is developing

It must be said that, different from the public opinion and consumer market environment in China, the development of overseas social e-commerce enterprises holds both challenges and opportunities.

Challenges: Traditional e-commerce and social media platforms are actively looking for new opportunities for digital transformation

According to a survey of over a thousand consumers’ social e-commerce behavior in 2021 by the U.S. social platform sproutsocial, it was found that:

• 68% of consumers have made a purchase on social media in 2021, and the proportion is still increasing.
• Consumers are mostly turning to big social e-commerce platforms such as Facebook stores, Instagram shopping and TikTok shopping for purchase.
• Despite the oversea overall sluggish economy, the trend of social e-commerce is not slowing down. 98% of consumers plan to purchase at least once through social or influencer e-commerce in 2022. It can be seen that large social platforms have started to do transformation preparation and attempts under the general trend of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consumption change. Some localized social platforms, lacking technical strength, will also consider the deep binding with some traditional e-commerce SaaS platform, such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, WowCommerce in order to quickly keep up with the changing needs of users.

Each enterprise specializes in its own field. So, cooperating with upstream and downstream enterprises in the market ecology to occupy the market in a strong joint venture, which is equivalent to racing with the market, is the fastest solution to occupy users’ minds

Opportunities: the brand loyalty of users cannot be underestimated

Different from domestic consumers who prefer to complete the consumption loop on one or several apps, most overseas consumers are more accustomed to shop on brands’ official websites, which is one of the reasons why overseas DTC e-commerce can grow rapidly.

Examples would be easier to understand.

According to the “ Consumer Shopping Trust Survey on U.S. Top Social Platforms” released by Insider Intelligence in 2021, users’ attitudes toward buying goods directly on Facebook are polarized: 45% of surveyed users said they would buy goods directly on Facebook, 35% said they would not, and 20% had a neutral attitude towards the e-commerce of Facebook.
Eventige, an oversea marketing media, said in its blog post that 50% of millennials (generation born in 1980~1995) will search for product information online or on social media, and then make purchases in physical stores. Overseas users have higher recognition and loyalty to brands, which may be a good opportunity given by the users to overseas brands for digital transformation.
For Users Traffic, or Users Retention?

In the era of information fragmentation and the content exponential growth, social media has solved users’ problem for receiving information without the limitation of physical space, and eventually become the mainstream position with active users, which is also the “traffic position” or “public traffic pool” that we often talk about.

During the explosive growth phase of social media, many brands have cooperated with social media to contact users in order to promote their products and brands. But for enterprises, this also means that they need an extra team to operate multiple social media platforms, creating content and topics of interest to the target audience to “cater to” them in accordance with the tone of each social platform.

Over time, the “traffic” still belongs to the platform and the brand enterprise cannot take away. Thus, the activity of the brand-owned position declines year by year and business owners have to accept the rising cost of platform advertising.

Perhaps the development of social commerce is a perfect opportunity for brands and local life platforms to put users “retention” back on the agenda.

Miniapps are better digital content carriers

It is often said that in the age of social media, content and user experience determine the winners.

In the era of graphic content, if the content needs to be presented to users quickly, the best technology carrier is HTML5 webpage, where the content can be displayed in the entrance of major social platforms after only one release.

In the era of short videos, H5 technology is inferior to miniapps for video processing and display. The code of the miniapp runs directly on the app with the browser dual-threaded UI rendering, business logic separation and other technologies, which will be much smoother than H5. Except for the loading time of a few seconds for the first opening, the experience of switching and jumping from one page to another of the app is already comparable to that of the native app with the same silky smooth effect.

This is one of the reasons why major traffic platforms, such as WeChat, Alipay, TikTok, etc., have started to build a free technology platform of miniapps.

FinClip helps YIPPI to build a super App in the field of social e-commerce

Yippi (related website: https://www.yippiweb.com, search “Yippi” in App store of Southeast Asia to download the APP) is a mobile communication and social media platform in Southeast Asia. It aims to become one of the largest super apps in Southeast Asia with content as its core. It expands the end user group of the platform by providing creators from all walks of life with the platform for content (graphic, video, live, etc.) creation and growth. At the same time, Yippi is also actively exploring cooperation with third-party service providers to provide its end user group with one-stop services for food, clothing, housing and transportation.

The reason why it chose FinClip, the embedded miniapp security sandbox of Finogeeks, is that FinClip can help Yippi obtain a large amount of content and resources on the supply side with the support of miniapp format specification, and then build a digital content ecology.

1、Simplify and modularize agile application development. The FinClip miniapp container technology breaks up the bloated App functions and decouples functional modules from each other to realize modular development (e.g. Yippi’s creator center). When each business module does not affect each other, dynamic updates and releases can be realized through the management backend, which can greatly improve development efficiency and reduce the costs.

2、Support personalized user content placement. With FinClip’s miniapp for gray release and A/B test, the existing business applications can be put into the target group precisely, and the intelligent recommendation of marketing activities and business functions can be easily realized.

3、Rapidly introduce third-party service ecology. With the help of FinClip’s miniapp management platform, Yippy can rapidly and massively introduce partners of digital scenes, serve its own users based on the mature miniapps of partners, and solve the problem of users’ platform stickiness.

In fact, whether it is a super application, or social e-commerce, the essence of it is the means for users retention. In recent years, it has often been said that “The essence of social media development is to build content barriers.” The so-called content barrier is not only the content creation that we can see, but also includes diversified functions that meet the needs of users, and contains the operation that users can complete without leaving the application as well, that is, users really stay.

Are you interested in learning more cases about how miniapp container technology helps enterprises build digital content ecosystem? For more information, please contact us now to start your cross-end and effect-raising journey for your miniapp (ecosystem).