The storefront has moved

Here is an uncomfortable truth for anyone running a consumer business: the place where your customers are making purchase decisions looks nothing like a shop. It looks like entertainment. It looks like a creator unboxing a product in their bedroom. It looks like a livestream where someone you have never heard of sells more in an hour than your flagship store does in a week. 

 

We are not witnessing the evolution of marketing. We are witnessing the collapse of the boundary between content and commerce - and most businesses are still organised as if that boundary exists. 

 

 

The debate is over

I still sit in boardrooms where executives ask whether social commerce is "proven enough" to justify serious investment. Meanwhile, TikTok Shop processed $9 billion in its first 16 months (Momentum Works, 2024). Amazon took eight years to hit $18 billion. The question is not whether this works. The question is why we are still asking.

 

Look East and the future becomes obvious. In China, social platforms already drive over 50% of all e-commerce. Douyin - TikTok’s Chinese sibling - processed $490 billion in gross merchandise value last year. That is more than Amazon’s entire US revenue (Bloomberg, 2024). We are not talking about a niche channel. We are talking about the dominant commercial infrastructure in the world’s largest consumer market.

 

Western markets are following the same trajectory - just five years behind. The infrastructure is built. The consumer behaviour has shifted. The only thing lagging is organisational willingness to accept it.

 

 

The real shift is not about platforms

What makes this moment different is not TikTok Shop or Instagram Checkout. It is the fundamental redefinition of who sells to your customers. Consumers make purchases influenced by creators. Not informed by. Not aware of. Influenced to the point of transaction.

 

This is not influencer marketing as we knew it a decade ago - celebrities holding products and hoping awareness translates to sales eventually. Creators now facilitate the transaction itself. They demonstrate, they persuade, they close. In Chinese skincare, 40% of purchase journeys happen entirely within social platforms. Discovery, evaluation, purchase - no website required, no retail footprint needed.

 

The businesses taking this seriously are seeing results that would have seemed implausible five years ago. Boston Consulting Group found that brands with systematic creator strategies achieved 50% efficiency gains and 30% effectiveness improvements. That is not marginal optimisation. That is a different economics entirely.

 

 

Why CFOs are finally paying attention

For years, social sat in a strange purgatory - clearly important, impossibly hard to measure. That has changed. Deloitte’s 2025 CMO Survey found that 64% of marketing leaders cite demonstrating financial impact as their top challenge, with pressure intensifying from CEOs, boards and CFOs alike. Everyone wants proof. Social now delivers it.

 

The measurement infrastructure on these platforms has become remarkably sophisticated. User-level attribution. Real-time conversion tracking. Performance feedback in hours, not quarters. Compare that to television, still estimating reach from panels of a few thousand households. Meta reported four million advertisers using its Advantage+ campaigns in Q2 2025, seeing 22% improvement in return on ad spend. When you can prove ROI at that granularity, budgets follow.

 

This is why the conversation has shifted from "should we experiment with social commerce" to "how do we reorganise around it." The accountability that finance teams demanded for years has arrived - and it favours platforms that were built for measurement from day one.

 

 

The organisational problem no one wants to discuss

Here is where most businesses will struggle: social commerce does not fit neatly into existing structures. It is not marketing. It is not e-commerce. It is not retail. It is all three simultaneously, and organisations built around those distinctions will find themselves constantly fighting their own org charts.

 

Content must be shoppable by default, not retrofitted after the creative team has finished. Measurement must track influenced revenue across touchpoints, not just last-click conversions. Most critically, the people managing your social presence and the people managing your commercial performance need to be the same team - or at minimum, share the same objectives.

 

The businesses winning in this space have collapsed those silos. Content strategy is commerce strategy. The feed is the shopfront. Pretending otherwise is a competitive disadvantage.

 

 

The window is smaller than you think

According to Forrester, 77% of B2C marketing executives are investing in social commerce this year, with 86% expecting ROI within 12 months. That is not experimentation. That is a land grab.

 

The compounding effects here are significant. Early movers build creator relationships that late entrants cannot replicate with budget alone. They develop platform expertise while competitors are still debating pilot programmes. They earn algorithmic favour through consistent presence while others start from zero.

 

I have watched brands delay by 18 months only to find that their competitors had locked in the most effective creators, developed playbooks that took years to build, and established consumer associations that advertising cannot manufacture. The window for first-mover advantage is narrowing.

 

The storefront has moved. The only question is whether you will meet your customers where they already are - or keep waiting for them to come back to where you wish they still shopped.

 

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Lara Daniel is CEO and Co-Founder at Pulse Advertising

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and FreshSplash