Jul 1, 2022

Social Commerce vs Livestream Shopping

Social commerce is an umbrella term that includes livestream shopping. It also includes content created by brands, influencers and individuals that drive sales. This can be through shoppable posts, comment selling, and in-app stores on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.

This report from Accenture breaks it down like this:

Sales can be content-driven (ex shoppable posts), experience-driven (ex livestream sales), or network-driven (ex group buying). And the sellers can be the brand themselves, influencers with big social media followings, and individual merchants.

At SoldLive, we focus on serving the individual store owners who are selling on social media. They have a very different set of needs then say an Influencer who has a ton of IG or Tiktok followers but no store of their own. For the Individual Seller, social commerce is a combination of livestream selling and shoppable posts.
Shoppable posts are sometimes called "wall drops". They can take the form of links to click on, or instructions to comment to purchase (ie comment selling). You can see how comment selling is done on Instagram for example.

We are very bullish on the "Individual" as opposed to the Brand or Individual. The Accenture article also says these individuals are making up more and more of the sales in social commerce:

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Any individual can now become or create a 'brand' of their own and reach a market directly. This has hugely positive implications for small businesses and entrepreneurs as they are able to reach potentially massive markets that were simply not available to them before. The math is changing dramatically. Rather than a handful of big retailers and brands selling to mass markets of millions, we're now seeing millions of individuals and smaller businesses selling to one another within a vast social commerce ecosystem.

Social commerce is expected to reach $99B in the US by 2025. Livestream selling is expected to be about half of that. So don't feel like you're missing out if you're not doing live sales. Half of social commerce will be from non-live posts.

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