INBOUND 2015

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How Buy Buttons are
Reshaping Ecommerce
Craig Miller
CMO, Shopify

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First:
A Confession

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Why go to school
when you can get
rich staying at home
making affiliate
doorway pages?!

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• Law coined by Andrew Chen
• This banner had a 78% clickthrough rate:
• Today global average is about 0.06%
• AdAge experiment had a 0.08% CTR
• We verified the AdAge experiment on Youtube with the same result
The “law of shitty clickthroughs”

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Buy Buttons

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Buttons embedded in Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. that let you quickly purchase without
leaving the mobile app. Most important: not generally available to most advertisers yet!
What are Buy Buttons?

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1. Because mobile is eating the world, and it’s inside apps where people spend their time
2. Because ecommerce conversion rate sucks on mobile. Keyboards are still too small!
(ApplePay, AndroidPay, credit cards on file with Facebook help address this)
3. Because social networks are the discovery-based marketplaces of the future
Why Buy Buttons?

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~25 mobile apps eating the world …

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• 2012: just 13% of ecommerce orders come in via mobile (Shopify data)
• 2013: jumps to 23%
• 2014: jumps to 33%, despite >50% of ecommerce traffic being mobile
• Why? Keyboards are just too small to enter credit card, shipping details.
• OS-level solutions: Sept 2014: ApplePay introduced, May 2015: AndroidPay introduced
Mobile eCommerce Conversion Rate Issue

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• Google and Amazon won search, and commodity product-based search respectively
• A big reason why malls still exist is because no one has solved discovery yet
• Our data is showing social+mobile is winning discovery: In 2014
• …5% of ecommerce traffic comes from Facebook on desktop, 7% on mobile
• …18% of ecommerce traffic comes from Google on desktop, 12% on mobile
• Facebook doesn’t know what you’re looking for; it just lets you discover things.
Search is a solved problem. Discovery?

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• Pinterest Buyable Pins – available to companies in the USA with Shopify & Demandware
- free to add/sell all your products. Advertising/promoting possible.
• Facebook Buy Call-To-Action button – limited beta available to Shopify merchants
- free to post/sell, but limited audience so advertising encouraged
• Twitter Buy Button – “in testing”
• I believe that this Christmas you’ll see buy buttons everywhere. Don’t be late!
Buy Buttons availability today:

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• REDACTED BY LAWYERS – sorry 
• But they approved me saying this: “if I didn’t have a great job, I’d start a company that is
100% focused on selling products through buy buttons.”
Buy Buttons results so far:

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No more online stores?
Taken to the extreme, could
all online stores be replaced
with valuable content that
includes Buy Buttons?

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But what if I don’t sell ‘stuff’?

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• In it’s first month it hit $1M in sales
• Sold over 500,000 moleskin notebooks
• Their market is responsible for 30% of their company’s total sales
• Wait… aren’t they a software company?!
Evernote market

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Products = great acquisition channel

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• Monetization on mobile is heavily taxed (eg: 30% goes to
Apple) and is often a shitty experience.
• Eg: Apps with banners until you pay, or games that are
free with either virtual currency or have upgrade packs
• When you monetize with ApplePay you pay Apple 0%
• ApplePay only works with physical products and services
Products = better mobile monetization

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TL;dl

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• The law of shitty clickthroughs says you have to always be on the bleeding edge..
• Buy Buttons bring discovery-based ecommerce to mobile via social apps.
• They also just really improve the mobile buying experience.
• Even if your business isn’t selling ‘stuff’ there is opportunity to use products to both (a)
acquire customers and (b) make some money
Too long, didn’t listen..

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Thank you
@craigmiller / craig@shopify.com