Why ‘Buy’ Buttons Will Pose Challenges for Google, Facebook, Pinterest | Hacker News Reader

Why ‘Buy’ Buttons Will Pose Challenges for Google, Facebook, Pinterest

recode.net

43 pointsprostoalex33 comments

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?

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.

I read somewhere, and I can't find it now, that amazon had an internal name for 1-click ordering. It was something akin to the money printer.

You may be an anomaly, but I think the evidence is quite clear that lowering purchasing friction results in a lot more purchases.

Reviews, free or fast shipping, and return policy are table stakes for ecommerce these days. If you don't have all of that you're doing it wrong. The buy button will conceivably offer that as well as (obviously) one-click purchases- making it a viable competitor to Amazon.

I think it will work with other types of products than the physical ones. Like events, digital assets etc.

True it will not work for most products but will work for fashion and clothing which Amazon lags bigtime.

"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."

'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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

You're overestimating the level of technological sophistication on the retailer side. Many of them not only don't have any "retailer APIs", but they have no internal view of their inventory - so if you want to find out whether a given store has a given SKU in given size, the only option is to call the store and have the guy check in the back.

A middleman service with a standard API plus the push from consumers / front-ends might encourage them to build that out. In any case, I wasn't thinking individual meatspace retail stores; I was definitely thinking more "whatever is sold on the web site now" (e.g. Macy's, Asos', Urban Outfitter's online stores - which I'm making the hopefully-not-wild assumption have their own separate inventory.)

Tackling per-physical-store retail inventory with the challenges you mention is definitely a whole other thing.

There is: https://twotap.com/

disclaimer: I am an angel investor in the company.

Very interesting. Thanks.

Pretty much what we're building at Two Tap, a gateway API that can be used to order any product from a supported retailer's inventory and benefitting from realtime product data (inventory, price etc). A huge benefit to being an independent API is that new features become available for all of the supported stores in a matter of days (vs months-years-never if each retailer would have to update their API).

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.

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.

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.

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

1 & move to another site when it happens.

There's always another sucker website.

I think there are more than 4 ways to monetize pinterest. But, I will cede that it might make a lot of sense for pinterest. It's pretty much everyone else doing it that i take issue with.

I don't browse Pinterest much, but it always felt like a shopping experience to me already. You're browsing products to find ones that you specifically like or want, so adding a Buy button seems like a natural extension.

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.

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

The last mile is still being handled by retailers.

The buy button primarily fixes the UX friction of having to leave the experience, go through a horrible mobile web checkout flow, enter your information again, etc...

Imagine those replaced with a streamlined flow (ala amazon single click buy buttons)

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.

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.

Good point, and that is not a cheap thing to setup. Amazon has a huge experience and infrastructure lead here.

I think 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.

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.

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