Social commerce accelerated in the US in 2020 amid the pandemic-driven ecommerce boom as key platforms advanced their shopping and checkout capabilities.

User-generated short videos are all over the internet, from TikTok to Instagram Reels to Triller, and the marketing opportunities are exploding. Here’s how the main venues compare across usage, paid advertising, organic and influencer marketing, and commerce.

Social commerce is at the nexus of media-commerce convergence, a much larger and more powerful trend. One outgrowth of the past decade’s shift from mass to addressable media is that brands can efficiently find and aggregate niche audiences while shortening their path to purchase. It makes sense that there would be efforts to explicitly commercialize media content by making it shoppable.

More than a year since launch, Verishop has made strides in the marketplace landscape. In addition to boosting discoverability efforts and continuing to work with direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, the company is also dipping its toes in the social commerce arena.

Here’s how publishers are developing and expanding their ecommerce monetization strategies, and how brands and retailers can partner with them to drive purchases in the affiliate channel.

Ultimately, this need has accelerated a shift toward developing one-stop shop ecosystems among POS and other commerce enablement providers. The emphasis on services as a revenue generator—especially as PaaS becomes more popular—has placed merchants and commerce enablement providers into a complex dichotomy, forcing them to balance cost pressure with the need for new technology.

Social media usage, advertising, and commerce will reach new levels in 2021, presenting big opportunities for brands to engage consumers.

The convergence of media and commerce is inching closer. Nearly a year after adding a direct checkout feature to its platform, NBCUniversal is investing further in the commerce space.

Digital commerce platform provider Avionos, for instance, was a Gold sponsor of Adobe’s Summit. Sponsoring these partner-hosted events has been the traditional way Avionos goes to market, according to Challin Meink, director of marketing.

For instance, both new and legacy social and ecommerce platforms are scrambling to accommodate the new trend of live streaming commerce videos (“live commerce”), wherein retailers and key opinion leaders (KOLs)—China’s term for influencers—interact with their audiences directly via video, and products are on sale in real time.

Singles’ Day is a must-see for tech watchers, as many of China’s digital giants have used past events to highlight retail tech, including virtual reality (VR) shopping, QR code payments, and livestreaming commerce. A few years ago, Alibaba introduced a Pokémon Go-like game called "Catch the Cat," which featured a virtual cat who drew shoppers to brick-and-mortar stores where they could earn points.

Live commerce is almost by definition a social media activity, but in first instance the traditionally nonsocial Alibaba properties led the way on livestreaming commerce. Eventually, however, everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, and the organically video-centric platforms like Douyin have an obvious edge going forward. The coronavirus. The pandemic cannot be ignored as a factor in 2020’s numbers.

Live means live. The nature of live video means that content cannot exactly be approved in advance or edited after the fact. For these reasons, brands are at the mercy of the talent and technology once the stream goes live. Audience interactions can be harmful. Live chats are an essential part of livestreaming.

Live Shopping. Facebook officially debuted live in-app shopping on its core platform in November, partnering with retailer Anne Klein for a series of holiday shopping livestreaming events. The launch has been a long time coming—Facebook first teased the feature during its Facebook Shop rollout in May. (In August, it also launched live shopping on Instagram.).

eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Debra Aho Williamson discusses TikTok's future: Can it keep operating in the US? If so, what will user growth and engagement look like going forward? She then talks about marketers' attitudes toward influencer marketing, major social media trends of 2021, and the prospects of live shopping on social media in the US.

Facebook Live: Updates to Facebook’s live video service include bringing back “Live With,” which allows users to add a guest speaker to their video regardless of where they are, as well as integration with Facebook Events. Users will be able to mark events as online-only, and creators and businesses will be able to charge guests for access to their events on Facebook Live.

Business Insider Intelligence research analyst Daniel Keyes and eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Andrew Lipsman discuss what shopping will look like next year: How quickly shoppers will return to stores, which brick-and-mortar stores will be left, and what the most popular payment methods will be. They then talk about consumers losing patience with Peloton, what shoppers want from returns experiences, and Facebook's new live in-app shopping feature.

The future of commerce? Social commerce, Verishop CEO says.

In April, it introduced several features for users, including the abilities to watch and comment on Instagram Live videos from a desktop, the ability to upload a finished Live video to IGTV to save it, and the ability for certain live video creators to charge for access to events. In the same month, Facebook made in-stream ads more widely available to Facebook Live creators.

Most influencers consider brand awareness to be their primary role when collaborating with marketers. But in the past year, social networks like Instagram have slowly begun opening commerce features to creators, indicating that influencer marketing could soon play a larger part in driving purchases on social media.

As COVID-19 shut down most brick-and-mortar stores in China, many businesses integrated with short-form video platforms (as well as Alibaba’s live ecommerce channel Taobao Live, which lives under its C2C platform Taobao) to conduct live streaming commerce. Digital Video Time Spent.

JD.com also partnered with museums to offer live streamed tours, which then lead guests to online gift shops. Most recently, the country's major mobile messaging app WeChat launched Minishop, which enables merchants to set up an online store without relying on third-party developers.