
Why ‘Buy’ Buttons Will Pose Challenges for Google, Facebook, Pinterest - prostoalex
http://www.recode.net/2015/06/14/why-buy-buttons-will-pose-big-challenges-for-google-facebook-pinterest-and-twitter/?
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sageabilly
I have given the side eye to all of the "Shop right in the app!"
functionalities that have rolled out in the past year although I'm the first
to admit that I'm not the type of person to randomly want to buy things that
are slapped up on my newsfeed. I purchase probably 90-95% of my online stuff
from Amazon and cannot see anything changing that, especially when I can go to
Amazon, look at tons of reviews (and I read the reviews on everything before
buying, whether it's $15 or $1500), buy with 1 click, know it's going to be at
my house in less than 48 hours, and know that there's a rock-solid return
policy that goes along with it.

I don't see the advantage of shopping from Twitter or FB or Pinterest,
although again I'm not exactly their target demographic. Are they hoping to
prey on teenagers and bored housewives with too much money to burn?

~~~
MichaelGG
Yeah that's the big question eh? The obviously "best" solution is integrating
with Amazon and calling it a day. But they can't do that, since Amazon's a
competitor. It's almost as if they need a Shadow Amazon that isn't competing
with them. Then they could integrate all properly.

Shopping on 3rd party sites is so horrible. "Oh, wow, free ground shipping...
great." And I get to confirm my CC info once more for kicks. And worry they
aren't gonna go out of their way to make my one-off $9 purchase right if
anything goes wrong. I often pay 2x more to buy something on Amazon than deal
with other vendors.

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rootedbox
"Varshavskaya approached multiple big tech companies this year, in part to
gauge interest in acquiring her company, multiple sources told Re/code. The
company has also been talking to investors about raising new funding, these
people said.

When asked for comment on the above, Varshavskaya did not directly address any
of it.

“We’re heads down at the moment with a ton going on, so we’re staying focused
on that for the time being,”"

translates to..

"Our model doesn't work.. we're heads down trying to see if anyone will buy us
or if we can come up with a completely new idea. If someone will fund us
during this time; That'll be really cool."

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psadri
'Buy' buttons can make a big difference, specially on mobile. Most retailer's
mobile web experience is horrible, specially their checkout flows.

An inline 'Buy' button can increase conversion rates anywhere from 2-5x which
is huge and a win-win for everyone involved:

User: better experience Publisher: higher revenue (CPA) Retailer: more sales

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johansch
I don't have kids, but I could imagine families that do have kids to expect a
whole lot of unexepected shipments of stuff if this pattern gets widely
implemented.

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nhebb
Can confirm. It's happened to us with Amazon one click. My wife stepped away
from the computer and within a few minutes my then 3 year-old had ordered a
game. The situation will be comical when kids can order directly via Google
searches.

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digisth
"Among the challenges these Goliaths face is integrating inventory and
payments systems from retailers big and small that have little experience
selling stuff outside of their own storefronts."

Seems like there could be an opportunity for a service to act as a broker;
they could act as a go-between for inventory related tasks and services
between the front-ends (Pinterest, FB) and the backends (retailer APIs.)
Provide a standard API on both ends (so retailers can update prices, number in
stock, tax and such, and front-ends can push buys and get updates.) If they
were front-end agnostic, they could save the retailers a bunch of time, and
handle API updates all in one place (preventing mass breakage when APIs
change, since a good part of their job will be to keep the interfaces up-to-
date.)

Retail API broker or something. I wonder if anyone is thinking of doing this
already.

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x0x0
I briefly consulted for a ecommerce search company.

It stunned me how many online stores selling _millions_ of dollars of goods
per month online are essentially incapable of giving you a csv with product
id, quantity in stock, and price.

Somewhere in the shit-mass of code that is their site there must be some way
to determine precisely what items are in stock and what the retailer would
charge for them right now, but it's apparently incredibly difficult to export
that : rolleyes :

Our solution was a combination of a semi-busted daily/hourly catalog export, a
site scraper, some machine learning, and some human intervention. It was an
enormous pain.

ps -- there are definitely ecommerce sites out there where the price you pay
depends on your navigation path through the store. I remain unsure if this was
intentional or accidental.

~~~
auston
Giving you a CSV with quantity that is "in-stock" could mean you need a new
one in a few minutes at worst and few days more commonly. Consider a model
like Groupon.com or Fab.com - one is dumping large quantities quickly and the
other is moving small quantities of well crafted / unique goods.

The best attack vector is obviously approaching people like prestashop,
3dcart, tictail, etc and trying to get them all to agree on a format to put
pressure on shopify. This would enable pinterest to get tens of thousands of
merchants on their site with little friction or data rot.

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Navarr
These aren't new problems. Companies have been solving and dealing with this
sort of problem for _years_. It's how a lot of Amazon retailers, and ebay
retailers, and NewEgg retailers, and Rakuten.com (Buy.com) retailers, and
Google Shopping work.

There's a billion different extensions just for Magento for "Product Feeds."

If you try to make it even more realtime, may god have mercy on your
bandwidth.

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meesterdude
pinterest on buy buttons:

> “They’re threaded into every aspect of the experience,”

Yuck. I never want to see a buy button. I understand the appeal on both sides,
but I myself will react unfavorably and likely close whatever account I have.

The web was not always a commercial venture, it used to be purely for
information. But, I think the commercialization has lead to a lot of growth
and good things, and that's certainly ok.

But the "buy" button is too much for me, it's too much commercialization. I
want to control when i'm "shopping" or not and this obviously seeks to blur
this. They want me spending more money online; I don't want to. It restricts
the shopping experience, removing any chance that you might shop around, or
read reviews, which just makes it easier to peddle shit. I really just don't
want that shit in my face every day.

But I don't doubt it'll work to some measure. And in some contexts for some
users it will make a lot of sense for sure. But I suppose I am not in that
target audience.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
What are your alternatives?

1\. Pinterest never makes money, goes out of business.

2\. Pinterest slaps ads up on their website.

3\. Pinterest puts "Buy" buttons on every identified product.

4\. Pinterest charges you $10/month.

#3 sounds way more palatable to me than #2. And we both know #4 isn't a
realistic option.

~~~
marblar
Realistically, #1 and #4 are the same option.

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VLM
3rd party shopping sites are so awful, and amazon is so good, that there's
probably a space in the market for a middleman doing nothing but connecting
product to amazon for people who can't politically be seen as connecting to
amazon. "Buy from VLM store" and all I do as a middleman is turn around and
order it from amazon.

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oimaz
Would it be fair to say that the biggest challenge with the buy button is the
lack of last mile fulfillment (like shipping, returns etc) from
Google/FB/Pinterest. Amazon on the other does a job at this

~~~
jbandela1
I agree completely. When I shop online, I like going with amazon since I know
from experience their return process is so painless if something goes bad.

I can't imagine shopping for physical goods from Google. From what I hear,
their customer service is pretty bad. I think overall that this is a risky
proposition for these companies, in that if they mess something up they will
have a lot of bad publicity.

~~~
jon-wood
In Google's defense their support for people who are paying money for a
service tends to be better - both AdWords and Google Apps have had pretty
solid support teams when I've needed them.

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elevensies
I think [http://liketoknow.it](http://liketoknow.it) is pretty smart and is
sitting at roughly the right level of coupling to the underlying platforms.
When you like the photo on instagram, it emails you about the product, which
was set up by the user that posted the photo. Easy and non-invasive.

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bitcuration
The problem is not shopping cart flow, the problem is small retailer needs an
alternative than Amazon or eBay to low their selling cost. Google Facebook
have the brand name and can help with the name brand, only they also have
affiliation program besides buy button. The buy button alone doesn't change a
damn thing.

