Social commerce trends for platforms

Social commerce is a consumer experience on a social platform that blends the point of inspiration and the point of purchase. Social commerce reimagines the rapidly evolving consumer retail experience in a social—and eventually unlimited—reality. Platforms are essential as they’re the destination for users, brands, and creators to engage in social commerce. Social commerce platforms are the “town square” where communities can gather to enjoy content crafted by creators and to interact with brands and their products. It's up to the platform to manage the social retail channel by connecting users with creators and creators with brands.

Social commerce platforms should have a set of baseline capabilities that can help reduce friction by orchestrating the entire ecosystem for consumers, retailers, brands, and creators. To start, platforms should play a matchmaking role, guiding brands to the creators or influencers that best align with their brand values and target demographics. Platforms also need to design an optimal digital experience that enables creators to easily integrate content and commerce needs, thereby convincing them to adopt commerce functionality. As part of the design process, leveraging analytics captured from the user experience (UX) can support brands in optimizing their marketing strategy. Building payment tools or partnering with payment platforms, like Shopify, could result in a more frictionless user experience while browsing shoppable content, along with a 3x higher conversion rate and sales lift¹. Platforms can improve the UX of shoppable media and in-app catalogs, while also embedding features that help validate product utility, through a seamless integration process that helps brands to set up their back-end systems and product catalogs.

By implementing these capabilities, platforms will be able to support brands and creators in a way that opens the door for an increase in number of users and overall user engagement.

Social commerce represents a $585 billion global market with expectations of surpassing $1 trillion by 2024². Social commerce platforms seeking to capture an outsized portion of the market will need a differentiated strategy to attract the top creators and advertising budgets from brands and retailers. Today, platforms already provide creators and brands with basic engagement insights and metrics that reflect effectiveness of content and marketing campaigns. Still, these metrics can be improved. Analyzing social trends and identifying product opportunities can help brands create richer purchasing insights and help creators develop relevant content, leading to more inspiring moments for consumers. Additionally, platforms that structure their operating model to support social commerce capabilities are in a better position to capture the ~27% compound annual growth rate from the projected global social commerce market between 2021-2025³. Designing a service model that can help brands and creators with onboarding, service resolution, and back-end technology integrations is a strategic approach for developing strong partnerships with brands in the social commerce space.

Social commerce platforms that expand or adopt these leapfrog capabilities can help differentiate themselves among brands and creators.

According to Forrester, only 10% of online adults in the US trust social networks to keep their personal information secure⁴. Recent app tracking transparency updates will prevent platforms from tracking user behavior off-platform on their mobile device⁵. Governments at all levels are increasing regulatory scrutiny over data privacy, which forces platforms to address how they can invest in commerce capabilities while also adhering to antitrust laws. Given the declining user trust in social platforms and the recent uptick in regulation, social commerce platforms will need to lead with purpose by protecting user information through enhanced platform security measures. Adding layers of security will be an essential step in transforming social platform users into social commerce consumers.

If you’re interested in engaging in the future of social commerce, consider ways your business can implement baseline capabilities to enter the market. Define your social commerce platform strategy, enable the back-end technology needed to orchestrate a seamless social retail experience, and help brands identify a set of authentic, diverse creators for their social campaigns who can drive higher engagement and sales conversion.

Given our unique access as a trusted advisor in the social commerce ecosystem, Deloitte is equipped to support platforms as they execute on their social commerce strategy. For more information, explore the additional perspectives we’ve developed on social commerce.