Marketplace in the Cloud

You’re scrolling through Instagram. Up pops an ad for your favorite shoe brand. It looks familiar, because you saw the same ad last week. You think to yourself, “To buy or not to buy?” You prefer a tactile shopping experience, so you decide it’s better to visit the store and try it on. Then, you remember the horrible traffic, your busy schedule and pushy salespeople at the store. The hassle puts you off. What if there was an easier way?

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It has not changed. A market is still a place where we go to buy and sell. The Mirriam-Webster’s [SP] dictionary defines a market as “a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade by private purchase and sale.” What has changed, however, is that markets no longer have to be physical. It can be virtual. Let’s face it, markets are moving to the ‘cloud’ and rightly so. 

According to statista.com, “as of the first quarter of 2019, 51 percent of global internet users aged 16 to 24 years used social networks to research products online. Overall, 43 percent of internet users started doing the same.” With increasing Internet penetration in Nigeria and the shifting of our lives to the social media, it’s a no-brainer to expect an uptick in online shopping. After all, we shop where we live. Just like you see adverts of products on billboards and posters as you walk on the streets or travel to work, millions of ads are viewed everyday as people traverse the streets of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. But it doesn’t stop there. 

Seeing an advert starts a process that we often can’t control as it happens mostly in the subconscious. An image registers on our minds, and when the opportunity arises, such as when your bank account is suddenly “blessed” with a back-to-live amount of money, your needs come to mind in a flash. Before the flash is over, you quickly recollect the adverts you have seen. Why not take a trip to the boutique or shopping complex to check out for yourselves what you want to buy, you might think? Some years ago, that is what most of us will do. It was probably the only way we know. In order to see what we want to buy, we have to go to the market. To say times have changed is to state the obvious fact. Nowadays, we are in so much haste and often so eager to ‘spoil’ ourselves that we don’t wait to take that trip to the shopping mall. Not when we can see it all on our mobile devices. But if social media platforms are the ‘streets’ that carry ads and posters, where then do we find the ‘showrooms’?