How Social Commerce is Transforming the Shopping Experience

It’s showtime!

The social media feed is the new storefront — and users are doing more than just window shopping. Since the arrival of Alibaba’s Taobao Live in 2016, a new chapter in sales has opened, which blends discovery, inspiration, and purchases on social media platforms.

Social commerce can be described as a shopping experience built around social interactions among people with shared likes, habits, hobbies, and behaviours from the consumer’s mobile phone (Source: BCG).

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When implemented correctly, social commerce can help consumers, brands, and platforms in three ways:

• Consumers — accelerate purchases: more seamless, convenient, and novel shopping formats and experiences.
• Brands — improving brand equity and differentiation: can strengthen brand positioning among existing and new shoppers with new shopping features that are natural extensions of social media platforms.
• Platforms — leverage shopper data to support offerings: benefit from opportunities to collect data about consumer behaviours and preferences to evolve their existing and future propositions.