Social Live Shopping is Dead — Long Live Video Commerce (Nearly) Everywhere Else

Instagram’s live shopping functionality quietly went the way of the Dodo Bird in April, limping into obscurity just a few short years after a pandemic-era launch that aimed to capitalize on the eyeballs and wallets of a homebound audience.

The move isn’t shocking, and it comes as just the latest in a series of setbacks in the social commerce space. Instagram completely removed its shopping tab from its homepage in February, and Facebook put the kibosh on live shopping last October. On TikTok, livestream shopping in the U.S. has been announced, then delayed, and re-announced again last fall.

The social giants were spurred into taking up livestream and video commerce by the medium’s jaw-dropping explosion in Asia. In China, where virtually all e-commerce takes place in closed-loop walled gardens, livestream shopping boomed to just shy of $500 billion last year.

We’re obviously not getting that kind of pickup in social video shopping here in the States. So if you were basing the long-term fate of video commerce solely on its performance in the social sphere, you could be forgiven for thinking that the future doesn’t look too bright.

But fortunately, you’d be wrong. Shoppable video and livestream shopping aren’t dead. Far from it, in fact. They’re just not happening on social media, and likely never will. There are a few key reasons for that:

• Brands want control over the shopping experience: The social giants excel at user experience. They’ve built every aspect of the experience to be enveloping, engaging, and borderline addictive. However, with less mature e-commerce functionality, that experience doesn’t always extend to shopping and purchasing. Furthermore, brands work extremely hard to cultivate their own end-to-end experience and look and feel. By selling in an environment where they can’t control the experience and the context through which their goods are shown, brands are making massive concessions when it comes to how they and their products are presented.
• Social selling prevents the flow of customer data: Perhaps most importantly, social selling drives a wedge between the brand and the customer, in many cases depriving the brand access to critical customer information. When a customer bought through Instagram Checkout, for example, that customer data was stored in the app and the brand, without access, missed a key opportunity for future marketing, personalization, and repeat sales.
• Customers want to make purchases in a secure environment they can trust: There’s a very evident trust gap between buyers and social networks. Nearly half of people say they're concerned their purchases won’t be protected through social buying. Among people who have never made a purchase through social networks, 41 percent say they're hesitant to because they don’t trust social platforms with personal data. Even among people who have made social commerce purchases, a full 29 percent share the same concern. At the same time, the process can feel Byzantine, with 29 percent of non-social commerce shoppers saying that trying to make a purchase is too difficult or confusing.

While social might not be the best arena for video commerce, the practice itself is still gaining steam. A $20 billion market last year, livestream shopping in and of itself is expected to more than triple by 2025 to $68 billion.

Shoppable video is also too valuable a resource to leave untapped. Video commerce is shown to collapse the marketing funnel, bridging the gap between discovery and purchase. So how can brands connect the dots? By taking the video experiences customers seek on social and placing them exactly where brands make all of their sales — their own websites.

By bringing shoppable experiences to their own websites, brands can take all the best parts of the social live shopping experience — community building, organic engagement, powerful video — without sacrificing branding, customer trust or first-party data.

At the same time, brands and retailers can use shoppable video as a direct lever to better differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Using in-house associates as streamed talent and tapping into new innovative formats drives a sense of authenticity and brand appeal.

So despite all the best efforts from the walled gardens of the world, the video commerce revolution won’t be happening within their walls. Even now, only about 4 percent of online purchases are made through social sites in the U.S. All that remains is for brands to recognize the unmet desire for shoppable video and stand up the capabilities to deliver on their own digital properties.

Meg Siegel is vice president of brand marketing at Firework, an end-to-end video commerce solution built for websites, apps and stores.