River Island rolls out new tech to boost social shopping

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 26, 2019

With ‘social shopping’ becoming an increasing focus for fashion retailers large and small, River Island is “rolling out a suite of advanced technology, streamlining its social commerce capabilities to power discovery-driven purchasing.”

The company has linked up with specialist Curalate “to align social shopping experiences on and away from its website.” It’s using a feature called Like2Buy to make its Instagram feed shoppable, while harnessing user generated content tagged #ImWearingRI by displaying it on a shoppable gallery on-site. 

The retailer’s head of e-commerce, Gemma Scarfe, said that what’s important about this is the way it’s “not only making this content shoppable across platforms but curating it in a clever way that encourages further engagement” on its website.

River Island has also implemented the tech company’s Showroom function, which turns any image or video into a virtual pop-up shop, which means consumers can discover and directly buy a range of recommended products from any social post.

And we should expect to see more such tech deployment as social shopping is only going to grow in importance. 

Apu Gupta, CEO of Curalate, said: “Visual content is the new storefront, helping people imagine products in their lives. In order for commerce to flow, these images need to inspire to the point of purchase. River Island will turn fans into shoppers by influencing product consideration early in the customer journey and motivating them to buy items they weren’t necessarily looking for.”

The company has an impressive line-up of brands currently using its technology, including QVC, Arcadia, Karl Lagerfeld, and Louis Vuitton.