Like e-commerce, social media is a vast online ecosystem that connects people globally on
an unprecedented scale. When e-commerce leverages social media, it’s a game changer for
both ecosystems. The advantages are too apparent to ignore in your eCommerce Website Development.
Consequently, the term social commerce came into being in 2005 when Yahoo used it for
the first time. It was described as an online shopping tool for sharing product information and
advice through social media platforms. Since then, social media integration with e-commerce
has only grown and become more mainstream.
The number of social buyers in the United States is expected to be 110.4 million in 2024,
while the total sales from US social commerce in 2025 is expected to cross the $100 billion
mark.
How Does Social Commerce Work?
As per available statistics, around 5.4 billion people use social media, which is about 62.3%
of the world population (7.9 billion). Similarly, over 2.14 billion people use e-commerce to
buy items online, which is about 27% of the total global population.
Social commerce works through several ways such as product discovery, recommendations,
reviews, sharing, ratings, transactions, and loyalty programs. As a social media user, you
can easily relate to these common social commerce activities. For an e-commerce
development company, social commerce is a new horizon to be tapped in their e-commerce
projects.
Benefits of Social Commerce
Social commerce is merging social media with e-commerce. While more than half of the
global population is on social media, the business and corporate world are also on these
platforms in big measure to attract and engage with their audiences. As social interactions
turn into product discovery, recommendations, sharing product information, etc., the
distinction between social media and e-commerce gets blurred. Rather, the phenomenon
can be understood as social commerce, which emerges as a distinct entity with a set of
benefits. Let’s discuss five of its benefits:
1. Seamless Shopping Experience
Social Commerce tries to reduce friction between product discovery and purchase. For this,
they have integrated features that offer a complete shopping experience. You can discover
the products, see their prices, ratings, and recommendations, and purchase them by making
payments without ever coming out of the social media platform.
For example, Facebook Shop offers an online retail storefront on Facebook and Instagram
where you can open your store, display your products, and sell them. It also offers Facebook
Marketplace where you can display and sell their products without opening a store. If you are
an e-commerce operator, you can ask your e-commerce Website Development company to
leverage these social commerce features to make your e-commerce venture more powerful
and successful.
Pinterest Shopping and TikTok Shop are the social commerce platforms of these two social
media giants. All of them offer a seamless and friction-free e-commerce experience.
[See related article: Facebook Shops – How To Leverage The Social Giant As a Sales Channel?]
2. Shoppable Posts and Stories
Social media works through posts and stories shared by the users. Brands take it to a new
level where they promote their products and services through innovative posts and stories
and tag their products. When users click on these products, they are redirected to the
company’s site where product details and an e-commerce shopping experience await them.
It provides a seamless transition from inspiration to purchase.
Social media platforms also offer advertisement services where they boost your ads to a
larger audience who are not your brand’s followers. You can reach or exclude any part of the
world’s geography. You can even target local and hyper-local markets. Let your e-commerce
development partner create your brand’s social media pages and link them with your e-
commerce platform.
3. User Generated Content for Trust
The strength of social media is the user-generated content (UGC), which creates trust.
When someone shares their experience about a product or service and gives a positive
review about it, most people are going to trust it to some extent, if not fully. The UGC can be
a one-line review, rating, or recommendation or a lengthy shoppable post, with products
tagged to it. It can be a video or a blog with images. What is important is the trust that such
posts create and how it influences users’ decision to purchase. Social commerce leverages
this trust factor to convert social media platforms into an e-commerce vehicle.
4. Personalization and AI
Shopping on social commerce is increasingly becoming more personalized with artificial
intelligence. User data and behavior can be analyzed with new AI-powered tools for a vast
number of users. Subsequently, the users can be targeted with personalized product
recommendations with available social media marketing automation tools. It also helps
provide a tailored shopping experience. All of this helps social commerce stand out as a
valuable e-commerce partner capable of leveraging new technologies and expanding its
horizon. Modern e-commerce development services are aware of these advancements in
the e-commerce space. They can help you choose the right solutions for your e-commerce
business to benefit from social commerce and new technologies such as AI.
5. Augmented Reality Shopping
This is an excellent benefit of social commerce. You can see, for example, how a piece of
furniture will look in your home with the help of augmented reality technologies. Similarly,
you can try out a piece of clothing in a virtual reality set-up. All these technologies are now
available for integration into social media and e-commerce platforms. Users can benefit a
great deal from these features. If you are an e-commerce business, you can ask your e-
commerce Website Development company how you can integrate these solutions on your
brand’s social media pages.
Social Media Influencers As Brand Ambassadors
The rise of social media has created influencers, with each having a significant number of
followers. They provide in-depth reviews and analysis of products in their niche, which helps
ordinary users know about the products they are interested in. Brands often take these
influencers on board when they launch new products to disseminate information about the
products and their features. It helps social commerce across the board, helping brands and
consumers alike.
[Recommended article: Why Use Influencers? Social Marketing Trend You Cannot Ignore]
Social Payment Solutions
As social commerce becomes more popular, payment gateways offer customized solutions
for social media users. It allows social commerce customers to make secure purchases from
their favorite social media platforms. They don’t necessarily need to visit the e-commerce
site to make the payment and complete the purchase.
Take Away
Social commerce is an amalgamation of social media and e-commerce. There are so many
benefits of social commerce that you can’t afford to ignore them in your e-commerce
development. It offers an online shopping experience from your social media platforms such
as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. While sharing product information,
recommendations, ratings, etc. have always been part of social media activities, features
that let users complete the purchasing from their social media platforms are the defining
element of social commerce. New technologies such as AI make social commerce more
enriched and powerful.
[Recommended reading:How To Use Social Media To Find Winnable Ecommerce Customers?]
[Image credits – Main Photo by Borko Manigoda; other images, videos, infographics or screen prints are from their respective websites and/or social platforms or articles]
Ronak Meghani is a co-founder of Magneto IT Solutions, who has been working closely with B2B and B2C digital commerce medium and enterprise companies since 2010. He has helped more than 200 brands build or improve their online B2B and B2C ventures in contemporary eCommerce or customer-centric next-generation digital commerce.