Social commerce isn't happening

I distinctly remember when I got excited about social commerce. In 2010, I ran a couple of trend sessions called "Social Sushi" - social media trends with free sushi. Facebook was at the beginning of its transformation into an advertising juggernaut, and the idea of combining your social media graph with brands' product catalogues to create curated inspiration felt exciting and not creepy.

Fast forward twelve years, and social commerce hasn't happened in any meaningful way (in the western world, at least). In fact, according to Accenture, it's "set to revolutionise the way we shop " in 2022. Except, it's not. After pushing its shopping offer so hard that it moved it into the notifications tab in the app (!), Instagram now?plans to roll back its focus on shopping ?within the app (i.e. its social commerce offer).

This "scaling back" of Instagram's shopping offer comes hot on the heels of TikTok?quietly abandoning its plans to expand TikTok Shop ?outside of the UK and Indonesia. TikTok Shop, ICYMI, works similarly to those hugely popular livestreaming shopping channels in China. TikTok, being Chinese-owned, clearly thought this model could be replicated in the west and generate equally vast numbers of sales.

Neither IG nor TikTok's shopping efforts took off due to poor planning or decision-making by either company. Both products make total sense. As Benedict Evans often says, the perennial challenge for online shopping is discovery. There aren't enough pleasurable ways to browse products on the internet. You want some new t-shirts, say, but you don't know exactly which ones. On a site like ASOS, there are hundreds of t-shirts, and it's a chore to scroll and click through them all. There's no equivalent online experience to walking into the shop and browsing some carefully curated racks. And so, many retailers morphed their stores to be more about "experiences"; i.e. you go and try out products in a way you can't online before going back on your device to complete your purchase.

Retailers and tech platforms saw social commerce as a way to solve the problem of product inspiration online. Your social media platforms know what you like because of who you follow and what you click on, so brands could overlay this information on their product inventory and curate products that feel relevant to you. Like walking into your favourite store, except we've designed the store specifically for you. The TikTok livestreaming element took this curation one step further; your favourite influencers as personal shopping assistants, helping you to explore an even more tightly curated range of products based on your liking of their style in the first place.

So why hasn't it worked?

One factor I know from personal experience is that linking up product inventory to your Meta advertising account is clunky, particularly if you have an extensive, fast-moving product catalogue. I worked with a well-known homeware retailer a few years ago, and I know they struggled to keep everything lined up and up to date. As a result, it was often only the bestselling products we could tag for sale on Instagram; there wasn't much discovery available for shoppers.

Both Instagram and TikTok's models also rely heavily on short conversion timeframes. Livestreamed shopping is very QVC (hopefully you are old enough to get this reference); see it, buy it immediately. IG's model was similar - see a product, click through to explore and purchase there and then in the app. The reality is that very few buying decisions are so swift and so linear. As a result (as I saw first-hand with Instagram), you end up with the same brands using it. It was a real struggle to find Instagram Shopping case studies that weren't fashion and beauty - there was no proof of success to convince brands in other sectors, often with longer, more circuitous purchase journeys, to get on board.

The third factor (like any good consultant, I generally always do things in threes) is that personalised advertising has always been a bit creepy. And in our post-Cambridge Analytica, post-GDPR, cookie-less world, personalised advertising is even more creepy. And doing personalised curation at scale is a blunt instrument. You look at one mattress, and suddenly your social feeds feel like you're trapped in a nightmare where thousands of mattresses are chasing you through the streets. AI-fuelled targeting is still highly unsophisticated. Retargeting may be effective, but it’s not smart or curated.

So the short answer to why it hasn't worked is that social commerce technology needs to be much better. It needs to be better to convince brands that social commerce is a viable, long-term profitable option, and it also needs to be better to encourage more consumers to part with their cash within their apps.

It's one of those trends to park with the likes of VR and quantum computing; the potential is there, and the potential use cases make logical sense in PowerPoint slides. However, the execution isn't quite at that level. The experience of social commerce needs to be orders of magnitude better to capture both consumers' and brands' attention. It's also worth remembering that for all the excitement around social commerce, ecommerce itself is still only around?25% of all retail sales ?in the UK - having peaked at about 40% during the height of the COVID pandemic. People in comms and marketing need to avoid getting too distracted by the shiny latest trends and focus on?the deeper, slower-moving underlying trends . Probably worth remembering that if you see "social commerce" pop up in any trend reports for 2023, given that season is nearly upon us.