Buyers and sellers are online – that’s old news. Social commerce defines the era post COVID 19. We saw how digital platforms saw a boom when the world was under lockdown, but generation Z’ers also known as the digital natives are accustomed to buying online more specifically through social commerce uses networking websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They share their feedback, remorse, gratitude, and regret through social media.

The disparity                                   

This sounds somewhat like traditional ecommerce, then how is it different from the latter. For starters, social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction whereas, ecommerce means buying and selling goods, products, or services over the internet.

The global social commerce industry is expected to grow three times as fast as traditional e-commerce, from $492 billion in 2021 to $1.2 trillion by 2025, a new Accenture report titled “Why Shopping’s Set for a Social Revolution” revealed. The growth will be driven by Gen Z and millennial consumers who will account for 62% of global social commerce spend by 2025. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of social media users — an estimated 2 billion social buyers — said they made a purchase on social media in the past year.

Measure of success

A social commerce campaign’s success is measured by the degree to which consumers interact with the company’s marketing through retweets, likes, and shares. In case of traditional ecommerce, the success metrics were involved around delivery time, conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate and others.

Social is more accessible

With social commerce, the entire shopping experience — from product discovery and research to the check out process — takes place right on a social media platform. Technically, this eliminates the need to own a domain and website for start-up entrepreneurs and small businesses. Every ounce of success is determined due to the social media platform. To be more precise, social selling is like setting up a shop on social media.

Social makes it faster

See it, click it, buy it. Social media shops remove friction from the consumer journey, making it easy to follow through from discovery to purchase. They’re there. The product’s there. Nowhere to go but the checkout.

Ultimately, every click of the mouse is an opportunity for a potential customer to change their mind. If they have to go from your ad, to your website, to add the product to a cart, to filling in their credit card info, that’s a lot of moments to lose their attention.

Take those unnecessary steps away and just bring the shopping right to social.

The future

Platforms have taken the lead on social commerce, with Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok rolling out shopping features and partnerships that seek to increase adoption by brands and consumers. Similarly, Walmart has made several partnerships as it continues to ramp up its social commerce capabilities. There’s more to come as the big brands alleviate shopper’s concerns and social selling safe for hesitant customers. Until then, the future of social selling and shopping remains promising.