Ever since social media has come into existence, it has proven to be a boon for eCommerce businesses and marketers. Be it a start-up or a well-established business, social media has acted like a best friend and got the back of the businesses to help them make a place for themselves in the highly competitive marketing ecosystem.

Businesses and marketers leverage several social media platforms to improve their overall brand engagement, improve their brand awareness and visibility, and maximize their revenues and profits.

The inception of social commerce changed the social media marketing landscape entirely and made it more convenient and easier for eCommerce businesses to promote their products.

Keep reading the blog till the end to find out more about how the revelation of Social Commerce evolved the functioning of Social media.

What Is Social Commerce?

Let us start with the basics first and understand what Social Commerce is all about.

To make it as simple, Social Commerce is buying and selling products and services on various social media platforms.

It allows brands to display their products on social media channels, enables social media users to buy the products, and offers a seamless and easy shopping process resulting in a flawless social shopping experience.

Social Commerce offers a brilliant experience to shoppers right from product discoverability to the final confirmation checkout step.

Why Did Customers Move From eCommerce Platforms To Social Media?

Social Media platforms were mainly discovered and introduced by the founders to bridge the gap between distances and to socialize.

These platforms were mainly used by users to connect with their friends and family, to make new connections, and interact with others, and nobody could guess that they would gradually be used for shopping in the coming times.

Over the years, Social media platforms became famous among brands and eCommerce businesses. They felt the need to promote their products to build a relationship with the customers and improve their brand visibility on various social media platforms due to the immense popularity and the daily number of users.

Soon enough, users started taking shopping inspiration from these platforms and eventually landed on the famous eCommerce websites to make their purchases.

However, the platforms mainly dominated by visuals like Instagram and Pinterest brought a major change in the scenario and the mindset of the people.

All customers look for from shopping platforms. It is a seamless and easy shopping experience that they could not completely achieve on eCommerce platforms, resulting in the rise of social commerce, which has been explained in the next section.

The Rise Of Social Commerce

Since a regular online shopping scenario involved multiple steps, including product discoverability which was time-consuming, people started spending more time on social media platforms to look for inspirations, and the evolution of influence marketing added more fuel to the fire and additionally gave customers the ideas in which the products can be utilized or worn.

On average, a user spends more than 2 hours a day on social media, and surveys suggest that every user follows about 1 business account on average. All the above-mentioned facts and the change in the mindset of users compelled to bring a change in the social media scenario and gave rise to Social Commerce- the perfect solution to bring a huge change in the way shoppers shop.

Additionally, selling products on social media has many other added advantages too. Since it is a platform with billions of daily users, it gives brands a golden opportunity to target their potential audiences more and communicate more with their existing customers.

Apart from targeting audiences, a majority of social media users were looking for an appropriate way to save their time spent shopping on eCommerce platforms and to avoid those lengthy checkout processes; social commerce has solved these issues by making the overall purchase journey of the users more seamless, quick and convenient by offering a simple checkout step.

Social Commerce also provides brands with an opportunity to increase their user engagement, build social proof, instill faith and confidence in new customers, and of course, increase conversions and sales.

In the next section, we have highlighted the major benefits of social commerce in detail that you do not want to miss!

The Incredible Benefits Of Social Commerce

  • More Satisfied Customers

Consider this – a shopper is much more likely to be happy and content with the purchase when they get validation from their friends, family, or other members. Similar is the case with social commerce.

While shopping online, people go through reviews, recommendations, and testimonials of other customers and get a clear understanding of what exactly to expect before finally purchasing the product.
This leads to a more satisfied and happy shopping experience for the customer and they are more likely to come back for another purchase.

  • Give Customers A Friction less Checkout Experience

Social commerce provides customers an easy, quick, and seamless shopping journey. Unlike a regular checkout process at an e-commerce platform that involves customers filling lengthy forms to complete the purchase, the buying process can easily be completed in a few taps and clicks through social commerce!

  • Increased Genuine Engagement

Social commerce not only opens but also increases the communication between brands and their customers.
The process is pretty simple. When brands post content on social media, the users engage with the post by liking it, commenting on their views, tagging their friends, and sharing the post with their friends and connections.

It gets even more engaging and interactive when the brand responds to the customers and results in a closer brand-customer relationship through the genuine engagement of the customers.

Summing It Up

Social Commerce is truly an amazing invention! Be it the Shoppable posts on Instagram along with Instagram checkout, online store on Facebook, Pinterest’s buyable pins or Shop tab, or TikTok shopping in partnership with Shopify, almost all social media platforms have launched a shopping section after understanding about the advantages and benefits.

Social Commerce is the future of shopping and is here to stay. The Social Commerce industry is likely to become an industry worth more than 604 billion dollars by 2027!

This is your golden chance, Get going and leverage the power of social commerce along with social media.

Now that you know how tremendously social commerce can help your business thrive, you just need to pick an appropriate platform and enable the shopping feature!