A Whole New Shopping Experience through Social Commerce.

E-commerce and social media have changed the way people accomplish things forever. Need to purchase something? Instead of going to offline stores, it’s right on your hand, in your phone through the thousands of available e-commerce options. Shopping has never been easier. The same goes for social media. Connecting with people is so much easier through these social media platforms. Seeing what your friend is up to is as easy as opening an app. Now, what could happen if they were mushed together creating a whole new experience altogether.

Depending on your experience on the internet, you may or may not have heard the term Social Commerce. It might be a new foreign word to some, but for a long time, social commerce has sneaked its way into social media apps that you probably have on your phone right now. Heck, you could even be using the application right now! Okay, let’s back up a little, what exactly is social commerce?

Social commerce is essentially the process of buying or selling products directly on social media. The entire process, from finding the product to checking it out, takes place right on that one social media platform. It creates a seamless shopping experience, without having to switch through apps. Some of the leading social media platforms have implemented the commerce aspect to their apps.

Facebook has announced the launching of both Facebook and Instagram shops back in May 2020. With the launching of the feature, Facebook hopes that businesses would be able to utilize it to have their product listings directly on their Facebook shop. The end goal is to have Instagram or Facebook users carry out their transactions right on the app. Instagram describes that, once the users are on the shop page, they can browse for products, explore collections, and finally purchase products without having to switch between apps. Shopping through Instagram is, in reality, not a new thing. People have been using the app as a promotion platform and catalog for users to look at for a long time. So the whole social commerce thing, if done right, would be a new exciting trend. As of now, Instagram has launched the shop page to a lot of shops, but not everyone in the world could transact in the app just yet.

On the other hand, TikTok has joined hand with Shopify to create its own social commerce experience on their app. As of May 2021, they have started to test their own shop feature.

source:

https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-commerce/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/zuckerberg-announces-facebook-shops-e-commerce-for-businesses.html

https://business.instagram.com/blog/introducing-shops-on-instagram

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/27/tiktok-invests-in-social-commerce-via-new-shopify-partnership/