Social commerce
What is social commerce?
Social commerce is selling inside the social platforms themselves: a product catalogue on Facebook and Instagram, price tags on posts and reels, and a purchase that starts there. In most of Europe the checkout still happens on the shop’s own site, with the catalogue fed by a product file. Paying inside the app is a United States feature, so plan on the sale finishing on your own site.
Example
A jewellery shop uploads 180 items to Commerce Manager through a product file generated by its website. The file refreshes twice a day, so a sold-out piece disappears from the tags on Instagram within hours rather than at the end of the month.
One month: 240 clicks from product tags, 26 orders, €2,340 of turnover at an average order of €90. Those clicks cost less than advertising because they come from posts that were being made anyway. But if the file stops refreshing, the same 240 clicks land on “out of stock”, and the shop has paid for attention in order to disappoint people.
Why it matters for a business
Social commerce shortens the path: someone sees the product in a post, taps the tag and reads the price without searching for it. It works best for things bought with the eyes — clothing, jewellery, homeware, food — and badly for anything that needs a specification table. The shop window is the start of the conversation, not the end of the sale.
Two things stay on the site, though. The first is legal: consumer-law requirements such as the price including VAT, the right of withdrawal, delivery times and the trader’s own details belong on the page where the contract is concluded. The second is data: an order completed inside an app can leave you without an email address, without an order history and without a second sale. The social platforms are the window; the shop is the till.
What to ask
- Where does the catalogue come from, and how often does it refresh? Sold-out items should drop out of the tags within hours.
- Does one feed serve Facebook, Instagram and the ads, or are there three separate lists drifting apart?
- Who answers questions that arrive from a product tag, and how quickly?
- Are orders from social traffic measured separately, with campaign parameters in the address?
- If the profile is restricted, can the shop keep trading without it?
The catalogue, the product file and the link between them and your online store are set up once and then only watched.