Giada De Laurentiis’ D2C Site Sees Content-Before-Commerce Approach Drive Sales

To win in contextual commerce, Giada De Laurentiis’ direct-to-consumer shop has learned, content is king.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Lindsey Galey, chief marketing officer of Giadzy, the De Laurentiis-founded publication and D2C retailer, explained that the company’s contextual commerce business benefits from the trust consumers have in the brand’s celebrity founder.

“Our biggest barrier was figuring out how to create the seamless process of conversion — within the ingredient list, within video, making [those purchases] really easy for the consumer,” Galey said. “Building a site that hinges off of that but not destroying the content portion of the site, which is hard to do in a D2C brand because you are trying to make the sale first. But we found that, when we put the content first, it creates a much stronger order value and a higher return rate for the customer as well.”

Galey said brands that go the other direction, starting with commerce and then laying on content, or brands that attempt to do both at once, have a harder time creating that connection with consumers.

On the content-to-commerce side, many publications have been monetizing their food content. For instance, just this month, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it is partnering with eCommerce solution provider Chicory to integrate shopping capabilities into content, enabling consumers to buy ingredients from their preferred grocers from its food-centric sites, FoodNetwork.com, Food.com and CookingChannelTV.com.

Additionally, last year, online grocery platform Instacart debuted Shoppable Recipes, a suite of product integrations that allow food creators to make their recipes shoppable on TikTok, Tasty and Hearst Magazines properties, including Delish and Good Housekeeping.

Yet, Giadzy’s forays into this kind of contextual commerce, linking out to external retailers, were unsatisfactory, with the company finding that the lack of control over the experience made it harder to maintain that trust with consumers.

“The thing that lacks is the entire context,” Galey said. “You can’t control everything from how someone is going to get their product, what the delivery experience is going to be like. If X retailer is selling your product, but it’s sold out, that comes back to your brand. That’s a frustration. That’s a pain point.”

Indeed, PYMNTS research has found that consumers do tend to be more satisfied with the websites, apps and checkout processes of D2C brands than they are with those of retailers.

Findings from the study “Building a Better Online Checkout Experience: The Key Features That Matter to Customers,” which drew from a survey of 2,030 U.S. consumers, showed only 11% of shoppers experienced a frustrating checkout process for their most recent purchase directly from a brand, a smaller share than said the same of any other eCommerce channel. Similarly, only 3% of consumers experienced website/app problems on D2C channels, roughly half the 6% that faced these issues on merchants’ channels.

“Being able to really control that entire experience from digital to cart to checkout to fulfillment to packaging, and then also giving people the recipe and the tips on how to create the dish — that’s where we’ve seen the real magic happen,” Galey said.