Social e-commerce continues to gain popularity, with sales expected to exceed $36 billion this year!

According to the forecast of PYMNTS, a well-known payment media, the global social e-commerce market sales will exceed 36 billion US dollars this year and will reach at least 45 billion US dollars next year. Many social e-commerce companies such as Tik Tok and Facebook have tried their best to attract investment from brands and guide buyers to consume with more discounts.

Just recently, Pinterest has provided a series of new shopping and brand display features in order to continue to expand and consolidate its position in the e-commerce market, providing merchants with more ways to connect with users and maximize this opportunity to guide their consumption.

Among them, the new "Collection Slideshow" promotion option allows merchants to "add the product sources uploaded to the catalog to an automatically generated eye-catching collection ad." In this way, the new "Collection" ad unit slideshow will appear in relevant searches, and then the backend will show consumers the merchant's related products at the right time based on a series of algorithms. It can attract consumers who are interested in similar products in a more targeted manner, while also maximizing the exposure of related products and expanding merchants' sales opportunities.

In the coming Christmas promotion, it is expected that many consumers will use Pinterest for shopping and increasingly rely on the platform to help identify their preferences and find the latest items related to them. Therefore, it is also a critical period for the platform itself to increase sales and improve exposure.

Facebook, one of the social giants, has also been developing its shopping features . In a new feature launched just last month, merchants can put a link on their Instagram profiles and people can leave them messages via WhatsApp. This allows merchants to communicate more directly with consumers, answer their questions in a timely manner, and improve service quality.

The success of the social e-commerce model is partly due to the fact that users in various markets have spent more time on digital media platforms in recent years. And this trend has only become more obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, the average time spent by users in the United States increased by 12% and in China by 10%.

The growth of social e-commerce consumption is closely related to the growth of content creation on its platform. For creators with more fans, the greater the social influence, the higher the brand influence will be.

According to statistics, 70% of brands will choose influencers to promote their own brands, and 63% of brands plan to increase their influencer marketing spending in 2021; on Twitter, 40% of users believe that influencers will influence their purchasing decisions, and on Instagram, this proportion is as high as 72%.

The marketing method of using influencers to promote products has become an indispensable way for brand merchants to promote their products. The global investment in influencer marketing has exceeded US$8 billion, and this trend is expected to continue to grow, reaching US$15 billion by 2022.

Nowadays, major social platforms are constantly updating their e-commerce functions, and merchants are also constantly innovating promotion methods. It is expected that the popularity of social e-commerce will continue for some time.

Social e-commerce

Pinterest