Swipe Culture In Mobile Commerce

To non-Magento specialists and other digital commerce aficionados (and children under 10!), modern browsing sounds a little bit like Morse code: swipe right, left, right, left, left, left, and you magically end up with two choices on your wish list and four resigned to the reject bin. It may seem a bit of a ruthless approach if you’re one of the rejects, but it’s proving such a hit for users of dating apps it’s popping up in other areas too. Let’s look at some factors involved in swipe culture for eCommerce.

Of course, the phenomenon started with Tinder, but it quickly became adopted for use in fashion industries as a mobile-friendly way to shop for clothes and accessories. Black leather boots? Right. Green stripy wellingtons? Definitely left. The experience of shopping this way is like wandering through a department store at your leisure, leisurely brushing away the aisles and products that don’t appeal to you. In that respect, it turns the art of online shopping into more of a game.

When customers are truly using the swipe facility to hone down the choice to the products they really are looking to select (rather than randomly out of boredom), the facility encourages a relatively superficial, snap response that’s likely to be based on looks alone. That may be great for picking a cheap new iPhone cover, but perhaps less sensible if you’re choosing a high-end product. Either way, the swipe binary approach to shopping throws up the importance of decent product photography, persuasive camera angles, colours and other design choices that affect that fleeting ‘moment of truth’ in the eCommerce marketplace.

If your business is in the right niche to make use of swipe technology, you can use it to build up a detailed picture of each shopper’s responses to your products, and that can provide a comprehensive understanding of their needs and requirements. That’s like gold dust for your marketing campaigns, as you’ll get a clear idea of who is most likely to respond well to different marketing campaigns.

The swipe may be only a phase in technological advances, but it’s a phenomenon that is set to permanently shape the way we shop online. Like with everything, use swipe technology to your advantage, but recognise its limitations.