Does an e-commerce store require social media sharing buttons?

securenetshop1Written by Secure Net Shop

One piece of advice always gets repeated again and again when it comes to e-commerce stores: Always have social media sharing buttons. The fact is that 84% of online shoppers use one social network or another. However, several sites decided to test what would happen when they ran pages without the sharing buttons. Would their sales suffer? Would traffic go down? Would there be fewer sales?

In fact, after the test was completed, it turns out that sales increased by 11.9% on the page without the social media sharing buttons. While this might seem counter-intuitive, there are two valid reasons for this outcome:

First is the case of negative social proof. When a site has a high number of shares and pins, that is a strong endorsement and is a positive reinforcement of what is said on the page. Unfortunately, due to a large number of items in most stores, very few product pages will have those sort of numbers. Most will have zero shares and psychologically this translates to poor quality for visitors. Confirm this by doing an A/B test, your web shopping cart will need to support multiple templates.

The other reason is a distraction. When a potential customer is on a page, the primary goal is to get the customer to click the add-to-cart and make a purchase using the e-commerce cart. The problem with additional buttons on the same page is that they take away from that goal. A page with social sharing buttons can have as many as six to seven while a site focused solely on the sale will have two.

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