What is Shop Socially?

What is ‘Shop Socially’?

Shop Socially is our vision of an internet shopping experience allowing shoppers to share information freely and make better informed purchases as part of an online shopping community.

Key to the ‘Shop Socially’ initiative are the social media channels Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. These are used not only to promote and provide opinion on products but to engage with our customers and establish Loving Outdoors as an approachable and human company bridging the customer/retailer disconnect that has become the accepted norm of online shopping.

As part of our Shop Socially initiative we actively encourage our shoppers to get in touch be it over the phone, through social media channels or our recently introduced online chat facility. Unlike most online retailers, we can guarantee there will be an interested, well informed and friendly human being ready to listen and assist with any enquiry or purchase- we want to get to know or, ‘socialise’ with our customers in order to better understand their needs and make their shopping experience as positive as possible.

So far so good- but the Shop Socially vision amounts to much more than touchy-feely customer service. As much as it is aimed at overcoming the customer/online retailer gulf, we hope it will also help to restore a sense of customer community that has so far been absent from the online shopping experience. Once social media technology catches up, ‘Shop Socially’ will enable shoppers to log into the Loving Outdoors website through Facebook allowing them to browse the store as a customer visible to others with whom they can discuss purchases and share reviews.

In keeping with the broad vision of Loving Outdoors, the Shop Socially project doesn’t stop at merely improving the customer/retailer relationship but aims to flip it on its head, putting the customer in charge. We already welcome customer input on our day to day operations but will ultimately take customers to the heart of the business as key advisors in the decision making process on business matters as well as our many extra-curricular interests. It seems a radical strategy in what is currently the remote and obscure world of online retail, but one with its roots in one of the founding values of the retail industry- the customer is always right.