Like e-commerce, social media is a vast online ecosystem that connects people globally on an unprecedented scale. When e-commerce leverages social media, it's a game changer for both ecosystems. The advantages are too apparent to ignore in your best ecommerce website development company. Consequently, the term social commerce came into being in 2005 when Yahoo used it for the first time. It was described as online shopping tools for sharing product information and advice through social media platforms. Since then, social media integration with e-commerce has only grown and become more mainstream.

The number of social buyers in the United States is expected to be 110.4 million in 2024, while the total sales from US social commerce in 2025 is expected to cross the $100 billion mark.

How Does Social Commerce Work?
As per available statistics, around 5.4 billion people use social media, which is about 62.3% of the world population (7.9 billion). Similarly, over 2.14 billion people use e-commerce to buy items online, which is about 27% of the total global population.

Social commerce works through several ways such as product discovery, recommendations, reviews, sharing, ratings, transactions, and loyalty programs. As a social media user, you can easily relate to these common social commerce activities. For an e-commerce development company, social commerce is a new horizon to be tapped in their e-commerce projects.

Benefits of Social Commerce
Social commerce is merging social media with e-commerce. While more than half of the global population is on social media, the business and corporate world are also on these platforms in big measure to attract and engage with their audiences. As social interactions turn into product discovery, recommendations, sharing product information, etc., the distinction between social media and e-commerce gets blurred. Rather, the phenomenon can be understood as social commerce, which emerges as a distinct entity with a set of benefits.
Let’s discuss some of its benefits:

Seamless Shopping Experience
Social Commerce tries to reduce friction between product discovery and purchase. For this, they have integrated features that offer a complete shopping experience. You can discover the products, see their prices, ratings, and recommendations, and purchase them by making payments without ever coming out of the social media platform.

For example, Facebook Shop offers an online retail storefront on Facebook and Instagram where you can open your store, display your products, and sell them. It also offers Facebook Marketplace where you can display and sell their products without opening a store. If you are an e-commerce operator, you can ask your e-commerce Website Development company to leverage these social commerce features to make your e-commerce venture more powerful and successful.

Pinterest Shopping and TikTok Shop are the social commerce platforms of these two social media giants. All of them offer a seamless and friction-free e-commerce experience.

Shoppable Posts and Stories
Social media works through posts and stories shared by the users. Brands take it to a new level where they promote their products and services through innovative posts and stories and tag their products. When users click on these products, they are redirected to the company’s site where product details and an e-commerce shopping experience await them. It provides a seamless transition from inspiration to purchase.

Social media platforms also offer advertisement services where they boost your ads to a larger audience who are not your brand’s followers. You can reach or exclude any part of the world's geography. You can even target local and hyper-local markets. Let your e-commerce development partner create your brand’s social media pages and link them with your e-commerce platform.

*User Generated Content for Trust *
The strength of social media is the user-generated content (UGC), which creates trust. When someone shares their experience about a product or service and gives a positive review about it, most people are going to trust it to some extent, if not fully. The UGC can be a one-line review, rating, or recommendation or a lengthy shoppable post, with products tagged to it. It can be a video or a blog with images. What is important is the trust that such posts create and how it influences users’ decision to purchase. Social commerce leverages this trust factor to convert social media platforms into an e-commerce vehicle.

Personalization and AI
Shopping on social commerce is increasingly becoming more personalized with artificial intelligence. User data and behavior can be analyzed with new AI-powered tools for a vast number of users. Subsequently, the users can be targeted with personalized product recommendations with available social media marketing automation tools.

It also helps provide a tailored shopping experience. All of this helps social commerce stand out as a valuable e-commerce partner capable of leveraging new technologies and expanding its horizon. Modern e-commerce development services are aware of these advancements in the e-commerce space. They can help you choose the right solutions for your e-commerce business to benefit from social commerce and new technologies such as AI.

Augmented Reality Shopping
This is an excellent benefit of social commerce. You can see, for example, how a piece of furniture will look in your home with the help of augmented reality technologies. Similarly, you can try out a piece of clothing in a virtual reality set-up. All these technologies are now available for integration into social media and e-commerce platforms. Users can benefit a great deal from these features. If you are an e-commerce business, you can ask your e-commerce Website Development company how you can integrate these solutions on your brand’s social media pages.

*Social Media Influencers as Brand Ambassadors *
The rise of social media has created influencers, with each having a significant number of followers. They provide in-depth reviews and analysis of products in their niche, which helps ordinary users know about the products they are interested in. Brands often take these influencers on board when they launch new products to disseminate information about the products and their features. It helps social commerce across the board, helping brands and consumers alike.

Social Payment Solutions
As social commerce becomes more popular, payment gateways offer customized solutions for social media users. It allows social commerce customers to make secure purchases from their favorite social media platforms. They don’t necessarily need to visit the e-commerce site to make the payment and complete the purchase.

Take Away
Social commerce is an amalgamation of social media and e-commerce. There are so many benefits of social commerce that you can't afford to ignore them in your e-commerce development. It offers an online shopping experience from your social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. While sharing product information, recommendations, ratings, etc. have always been part of social media activities, features that let users complete the purchasing from their social media platforms are the defining element of social commerce. New technologies such as AI make social commerce more enriched and powerful.

Author Bio:
Pritesh is the Director of Sales for the US, UK, and European markets for Magneto IT Solutions, a headless Magento development agency. He advises clients on their technology strategy, providing insights into the future of digital commerce for B2C and B2B mid-market and enterprise accounts. He has significant experience in the jewellery and luxury goods industry and enjoys consulting on digital transformation projects. He has over 15 years of experience performing various roles from consulting through to delivery.