Retailers across Western Europe are pioneering the use of AI to boost digital sales, and new options for delivery and returns are emerging. Yet Europe’s main markets have been slow to embrace social commerce.

Affiliate commerce isn’t new for many publishers, nor is it for marketers. But more content publishers are entering the affiliate space, creating new opportunities for performance marketers to reach high-quality audiences through high-quality content. Meanwhile, the affiliate model itself is evolving. Some affiliate networks now offer marketers more ways to attribute sales to multiple publisher touchpoints along the path to purchase.

And how an SMS message led to roughly $15,000 in sales in 15 minutes

Despite the hype, most US consumers won’t make a purchase via social media in 2021. Discovery and consideration, rather than direct transactions within social apps, will remain key opportunities for brands next year.

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

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.

Social commerce is a fast-growing segment of the US ecommerce market that’s garnering more attention and investment from media companies and brands.

China is the largest digital market in the world, leading all countries in terms of ecommerce, mcommerce and social commerce. It’s also home to many of the largest ecommerce conglomerates, including Alibaba and JD.com, who are generating sales at a scale that far exceeds that of companies in the US—including Amazon.

According to our newest forecast, retail social commerce sales in China will reach $363.26 billion in 2021, growing by 35.5% year over year. WeChat has also launched livestreaming functionality under Channels, where livestreamers and brands can easily connect to their WeChat Shops to enable shoppable live video.

Retail social commerce sales in China will grow to $242.41 billion (RMB1.675 trillion) this year, accounting for 11.6% of total retail ecommerce sales in the country, according to our latest estimates.

Social commerce has reinvented itself many times over but has yet to prove itself as a solid sales tactic. Next year, the version that has been evolving during 2018 could finally take hold.

Since Instagram rolled out its Checkout feature earlier this year, brands have begun linking influencer content to shopping tools as a way to drive—and measure—direct sales. Should the platform hide likes from public view, which it began testing in the US this week, influencer marketers could be forced to look beyond vanity metrics to more advanced measurement tools, including social commerce and in-store purchase behavior.

The adoption of social commerce—the ability to shop and buy, directly or indirectly, via social media platforms—accelerated during the pandemic. The vast majority of social commerce today is within the discovery and consideration stages. However, checkout capabilities are not available from the leading social networks in Canada.