What if you didn’t need to send viewers to your website to buy every product you promote on social media?
Social media has evolved quite a bit over the last 25 years, well enough to the point where you can sell products right within whatever social media apps you use for marketing.
In this post, we discuss the state of social commerce and provide tips on how to evolve with the ever-changing world of ecommerce.
What is social commerce?
Social commerce is a subset of ecommerce in which the online shopping experience, particularly the shopping cart and checkout aspects of online shopping, occur entirely within the confines of a social media app.
The best example of social commerce is Facebook Marketplace, though the most recent example would have to be TikTok Shop.
Normally, business owners would need to host their own online stores with ecommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce.
They’d then need to market their products on social media but direct users to their stores in order to complete purchases.
Unfortunately, starting your sales funnel on social media can be difficult. It takes viewers off platform and adds a lot of steps (clicks) to the funnel.
The more steps within your sales funnel, the less convenient it’ll be for casual social media users to purchase your products.
This is why many marketers have email lists.
An email list allows you to capture social media users as leads so you can send additional promotional offers to their email inboxes.
An even better alternative is social commerce, which is convenient for consumers for several reasons:
- It allows social media users to stay in the app when they want to purchase your products.
- It also allows social media users to purchase products without creating accounts for online stores they’re unfamiliar with.
Why social commerce is important for brands
If you already sell products online, you may be wondering if social commerce is something you need to consider.
It’s actually a lot more important than many brands realize.
In our article about key statistics for social media, we discovered how there are over 5 billion active social media users around the world as well as how internet users spend an average of two hours and 23 minutes on social media everyday.
This is just a taste of the potential social media has as a selling platform.
Here are a few additional statistics that demonstrate the importance of social commerce:
- 23.1% of social media users between the ages of 25 and 34 have made at least one purchase on social media.
- 40% of Gen Z and 37% of millennial social media users have made at least one purchase on TikTok Shop.
- 36% of Gen Z and millennial consumers have made a purchase on Facebook.
- 35% of Gen Z and millennial consumers have made a purchase on Instagram.
These stats come from eMarketer’s report on social commerce.
They show how popular shopping on social media is becoming among the 18 to 34 age group, a common target demographic for many brands.
But the potential reach social media brings isn’t the only reason why you should consider expanding into it.
Like I said, sales funnels can get pretty complicated. If you make a tiktok about your product, you need to send your viewer to your profile so they can click a link to your website or a link to your link-in-bio page.
From there, your viewer will need to either find the product on your website or find the direct link to its product page on your link-in-bio page.
They’ll shop as they normally shop from there. This step involves looking at the price, scrolling through your image gallery, looking at the product description, and reading through reviews.
And even after all of that, they still need to add the product to their shopping cart and complete checkout without getting distracted by anything else.
Social commerce simplifies this process by taking your viewer directly to your product page on social media. And because your viewer has likely purchased other products on social media in the past, they’ll be able to breeze through checkout.
Social media is also a common source for product discovery and research these days.
Many consumers use social media as a search engine to discover new products or find reviews and tutorials on products they’re interested in.
If you sell your products directly on social media, then create content that relates to it, you can potentially have your content appear in product-based search results.
Finally, social commerce is important because it allows you to diversify your selling channels.
Right now, you probably sell everything through your online store or marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy.
Selling through social media gives you an additional channel to work with, providing financial security if something happens to another channel.
Where is social commerce headed?
Social commerce is relatively new, so it’s bound to change three months, six months, a year and even a few years from now.
Currently, it works like this:
- You, as a seller, add your products to your social media account.
- Every product you add to your account gets added to your store page.
- A product page is created for every product you add to your account.
- When you promote the product on social media, you create a shop link for it that gets displayed in your post.
- The link takes viewers directly to your product page within the app where they can begin the checkout process.
So far, it’s almost identical to regular ecommerce.
You promote a product, and viewers who are interested in that product check out its product page and purchase the item.
But there are new technologies and strategies in the midst that have the potential to improve social commerce in the future.
For example, augmented reality (AR) can give consumers the ability to see what your product would look like on their person or in their homes. This is called “virtual try on.”
Between the popularity of livestreaming mixed with the emergence of social commerce, shopping channels are back, so expect to see more livestreaming ecommerce features in the future.
This is especially true for the livestreaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon.
You can already promote affiliate links from Amazon Associates within the About section of your channel, and with how popular live selling is becoming on TikTok, it won’t be long before Amazon makes it easier to promote Amazon affiliate links while you stream on Twitch.
You’ll probably also see a lot of AI integration. For example, generative AI is currently being used to create a lot of product descriptions in a short amount of time.
Peer-to-peer selling of used and secondhand merchandise is already popular on the web thanks to eBay.
Since this is also Facebook Marketplace’s primary purpose, you’ll probably see the secondhand market and features that relate to it become more popular in other aspects of social commerce as well.
Finally, there’s influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is a newer marketing strategy in which brands pay influencers to promote their products.
Smaller influencers, also known as “micro” influencers, tend to have higher engagement rates than larger creators, so don’t be surprised if you see more brands working with smaller influencers in the future.
It’s already happening if you consider all of the affiliate links associated with TikTok Shop as influencer marketing.
Which platforms offer social commerce?
Currently, the main apps that truly offer social commerce are TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
What we mean is, these are currently the only apps that allow customers to complete purchases directly within the app.
Yes, you can purchase movies, TV shows and membership subscriptions on YouTube, but this isn’t the same as being able to create a storefront on the app and allowing customers to purchase products without going to your website.
We’ll talk about how other social media platforms tackle ecommerce in a bit.
According to a survey conducted by Jungle Scout, the majority of Gen Z, or 71%, are most likely to make direct purchases on Instagram.
Breaking the data down by all consumers reveals how 49% of consumers are most likely to make direct purchases on Facebook.
TikTok
TikTok Shop is the social commerce section of TikTok.
In the past, you had two pages to scroll through: Following and For You.
Now, you have the Shop page, which is a full-blown ecommerce store built within the TikTok app itself.
TikTok Shop is not available in all markets around the world, but it’s definitely expanding more and more each year.
It’s similar to how marketplaces work on eBay and Amazon. The app is filled with products from thousands of stores that have created seller accounts and are now selling products directly within TikTok.
When you promote a product in a video, you can add an orange shop link that displays right above your caption.
Affiliate marketing has become available to all users who have access to TikTok Shop, so you can engage in influencer marketing by having creators promote your products on TikTok and compensating them with affiliate commissions.
Instagram Shopping hasn’t become quite as popular as TikTok Shop, but it more or less has the same features.
The major difference is how inaccessible shop pages are on Instagram.
TikTok Shop is just a click away, but seeing product pages being promoted on Instagram isn’t quite as commonplace at the moment.
Even so, if you’re a seller, you can add products to your Instagram account and promote them directly from your posts, stories and ads.
Facebook Marketplace is nothing new, but it’s definitely become a common aspect of social commerce.
However, because the owners of Facebook also own Instagram, the same shopping features that are available on Instagram are also available on Facebook.
You create a product catalog, which gives your Facebook page its own Shop page.
You can then promote products directly in posts and ads.
Snapchat
Snapchat isn’t talked about nearly as much as other social media platforms these days, but it’s still a fairly powerful platform that’s definitely keeping up with new trends.
This includes social commerce.
Like Facebook, you can create a product catalog to create a Shop page for your account.
Promoting these products in your content allows viewers to make purchases directly within Snapchat.
Social commerce adjacent
There are two social media platforms that allow you to promote your products with content (not just ads).
They are YouTube and Pinterest.
On YouTube, you can add products underneath the description of your video.
Your viewers won’t be able to complete a purchase on YouTube, but it will take them directly to the product page on your website.
The same is true for Pinterest.
You can now create shopping pins to promote your products on Pinterest.
These features work similarly to how product promotions work on social commerce-friendly platforms, so it likely won’t be long before these features take viewers directly to product pages within YouTube and Pinterest.
Are there alternatives to social commerce?
There are two alternatives to social commerce if you don’t want to sell your products directly on social media.
The first is obvious: create your own online store, and promote your products on social media.
We highly recommend folks who are new to ecommerce to create their stores with Sellfy.
It’s an affordable ecommerce platform that’s very easy to use.
Creating your own online store gives you the opportunity to build your email list with a service like MailerLite.
This gives you a secondary location to communicate with your audience and customer base.
The second alternative is a link-in-bio tool that allows you to create a simple online shop where your viewers can make purchases directly on your link-in-bio page.
Currently, Beacons.ai is the best option for this purpose, but Lnk.bio and Linkpop are also great.
Why you shouldn’t rely on a single selling channel
Social commerce has made the barrier of ecommerce easier for social media creators to cross.
And if you already own an online store, you’re probably fairly hesitant to start selling products directly within a social media app.
We think you should do both.
Your website and the ecommerce platform you use are probably fairly stable, but there may come a time where something happens to one or the other, making your store inaccessible.
If you also sell on social media, you’ll still be able to accept orders during this time.
The same is true for brands who only sell on social media.
You are not in control of your social media accounts. Almost every platform’s terms and conditions mentions the platform’s right to terminate your account whenever they feel the need to.
Plus, TikTok is currently being threatened or affected by bans across multiple markets, and Facebook has artificially decreased the organic reach of Facebook pages in the past.
And most of them have a problem with bots to some degree.
If you’ve only built your brand on social media, anything that threatens it will harm sales, so it’s better to use multiple selling channels.
So, while you can sell online without a website, it’s best to have one so you can build your business around a platform that you control. Then, use social commerce platforms to expand your reach.
Because that’s what social media platforms are best at in general; reaching a new audience. And people are more likely to trust TikTok Shop rather than a website they’ve never heard of before.
But after someone buys from you once, they’re more likely to buy from you again if they had a good experience. And that’s your opportunity to move customers over to your own website.
For example, you could include discount codes in products sold on social commerce platforms to encourage people to buy direct from your website in future. You could also incentivise signing up to your email newsletter, which gives you an easy way to drive sales in the future.
Remember: it isn’t free to sell on social commerce platforms. They do take a cut and you can keep all of the profits from items sold on your own website.
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