Social commerce is the buying and selling of products inside social experiences, where discovery, discussion, and purchase all happen in the same place.
What is Social Commerce?
Social commerce spans a range of formats, from shoppable posts and live shopping streams to community recommendations and creator-led selling, and it can run on a third-party social network or inside a brand's own app. Teams typically scope it around a specific purchase mechanic, such as a tagged product in a feed or a buy button during a livestream, rather than treating social commerce as one undifferentiated channel. A common variant is affiliate or creator selling, where a trusted individual drives the sale through a tracked link rather than a native buy button. The key caveat is attribution: because social commerce frequently assists a purchase instead of completing it, a format can look inactive on direct conversion alone while still contributing meaningfully through repeat purchases and community-driven recommendations.
Why Social Commerce Matters
Traditional e-commerce separates discovery from purchase: a user hears about a product somewhere and then goes to a store page to buy it. Social commerce collapses that path. A user sees a product in a friend's post or a live stream, asks a question, reads the replies, and buys without leaving the experience. Shorter paths convert better, and the social context supplies the trust that a product page alone cannot.
For brands, the strategic question is where that social context lives. On external networks, the brand rents the audience and pays for reach, and the platform owns the data and the relationship. When social commerce runs inside the brand's own app, the brand keeps the customer relationship, the behavioral data, and the margin. That is why retailers and consumer brands increasingly build community, chat, and live shopping into their own products.
How Social Commerce Works
Social commerce takes several forms, each combining a social mechanic with a purchase mechanic. The table below shows the main formats and the metrics used to judge them.
| Format | Social mechanic | Purchase mechanic | Key metrics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shoppable posts | Users share or react to product content in a feed | Tap a tagged product to buy | Click-through rate, conversion per post |
| Live shopping | Host demonstrates products with live chat | Buy button during the stream | Viewers, conversion rate, revenue per stream |
| Community recommendations | Users ask and answer in groups | Links to products within the discussion | Assisted conversions, repeat purchase rate |
| Creator or affiliate selling | Trusted individuals present products | Tracked links or in-app checkout | Revenue per creator, attributed orders |
| User-generated reviews and content | Customers post photos and experiences | Product pages surface the content | Conversion lift on pages with UGC |
A worked example shows how a live shopping event is measured. A beauty brand runs a 45-minute live stream inside its app with 12,000 viewers. During the stream, 2,400 viewers send a chat message or reaction, a live engagement rate of 20 percent. Viewers place 720 orders, a conversion rate of 6 percent, with an average order value of 48 dollars, for 34,560 dollars in revenue from the stream. The brand compares that with its standard product-page conversion of 2.5 percent and concludes that the live format converts more than twice as well for the same catalogue.
Attribution is the practical challenge. Social commerce often assists a purchase rather than completing it, so teams track assisted conversions and repeat purchase rates for community members alongside direct sales.
Social Commerce and social.plus
social.plus provides engagement infrastructure for consumer apps, which is the social layer that in-app social commerce is built on: feeds for shoppable content, groups for in-app community recommendations, chat for questions and support, and live streaming for live shopping. Brands integrate these through SDKs, APIs, and UIKit and connect them to their own catalogue and checkout, so the commerce experience stays inside the app and the data stays with the brand.
Ulta Beauty is among the brands using social.plus to bring community into its customer experience, and Harley-Davidson's community has grown past one million members. Engagement rates for brands on social.plus typically fall between 20 and 50 percent, which is the audience that social commerce formats convert. The infrastructure supplies the social context; the brand supplies the products and decides where purchase moments appear.
Key Takeaways
- Social commerce puts discovery, discussion, and purchase in the same social experience, shortening the path to buy.
- Formats include shoppable posts, live shopping, community recommendations, creator selling, and user-generated content.
- Running social commerce inside the brand's own app keeps the customer relationship, data, and margin with the brand.
- Measure direct conversion per format alongside assisted conversions and repeat purchase rates for community members.