By Anthony Ferry, CEO, Wayvia
When China recently celebrated the start of the Year of the Horse, social media influencers were busy selling vast quantities of gifts, beauty items, electronics and anything else you can imagine. Lunar New Year is one of the biggest shopping events globally, and in a nation where social commerce accounts for nearly 40% of online sales, it’s a key moment for influencers.
The success of social commerce in Asia, driven by hugely popular live sales streams, contrasts starkly with North America, where it has so far failed to graduate from the next big thing to an actual big thing.
The value proposition of social commerce is clear. Audiences are fracturing, and it’s getting harder to reach Gen Z with conventional advertising. Their eyeballs are always on their feeds, and they trust influencers like they’re family members. So collaborating with creators, creating shoppable content and enabling checkout without leaving a social platform is attractive.
Social commerce is expanding in the U.S. In 2024, the market was estimated at $71 billion, up 26% on the year before. But that’s still only a tiny fraction of the country’s $1.2-trillion e-commerce market, and far behind the $807 billion the Chinese spent on live-streaming commerce platforms that year.
I want brands to have as many options as possible to connect with their customers, and there is clearly growth potential for social commerce. But the market continues to be held back by the very platforms it relies on, which all too often create headaches for brands.
Take TikTok Shop. It accounts for about 20% of the U.S. social commerce market, and its algorithm has proven incredibly effective at engaging audiences and for product discovery. Where it goes, the market will likely follow.
But its shaky first week as a U.S.-controlled entity highlighted some of the chaos brands have to navigate when working with social media platforms. A data center outage, a political controversy and a reported surge in users ditching the app may be brushed aside as teething trouble. But brands have spent months adjusting their budgets and making contingency plans at each new twist in the TikTok sale saga. The last thing they want to see are more worrying headlines.
Many brands will be wary of going all-in on social commerce given their past experiences with conventional advertising on these platforms. Social media companies can — and do — change their algorithms and policies almost overnight, creating a scramble to adapt. Advertisers still shudder at the memory of 2021 when Apple’s iOS 14 privacy update largely broke Meta’s attribution model and created chaos for marketers. X, which was seldom a top priority for advertisers even in its heyday, has become a factory for controversy and brand safety risks.
Marketers want to get on with the real work of developing their affiliate programs and honing their content. But that’s difficult when the platforms themselves are sources of distraction and confusion.
Marketing departments are left with little option other than to hedge their bets among multiple platforms and channels. Instead of riding one crocodile, they’re riding a whole pack of them.
But that is becoming harder to do as competing priorities pile up. Sales and marketing teams’ time and attention are being taken up by the rapid rise of gen AI and agentic shopping. These will completely rewire how product discovery and purchase happen and make years of work perfecting ad words and SEO irrelevant. Each AI agent also potentially represents a new channel that brands will have to manage, adding complexity to measurement and tracking. And then there’s the possibility that every product detail page will need to be redesigned to appeal to AI buyers first and human ones second.
By comparison, social commerce should have been a relatively easy nut to crack. The technology is proven, the influencer ecosystem is well developed and it has been working well in Asia for years. As agentic AI scrambles sales funnels, social media will become even more important for product discovery. Though mediated by algorithms, it will remain a human-centered experience where authenticity and credibility are currency.
But for social commerce to reach its potential, brands need to be able to trust that the platforms they’re spending on are predictable and stable partners. If not they will take their ad dollars elsewhere. When it comes to social media platforms, no news is good news.
About the Author
Anthony Ferry is co-founder and CEO of Wayvia, the global leader in omnicommerce data and brand enablement. By connecting shopper and retail intelligence across every channel, brands gain deeper insight into consumer behavior and unlock new opportunities to improve the path to purchase, whether through offsite media, onsite experiences or agentic commerce. Backed by the world’s largest network of retailer and media partnerships, Wayvia offers brands the retail intelligence to power analytics, optimize shopping journeys and enable AI solutions. For more information, please visit wayvia.com to learn more.
