Ecommerce vs Social Commerce: Understanding How Social Platforms Are Reshaping Online Retail

Defining Social Commerce: A Dual Approach

Social commerce isn’t a singular concept but encompasses two distinct yet interconnected dynamics that retail media marketers need to understand:

1. Platform-integrated shopping: This includes ad formats and organic posts that enable checkout directly within social platforms like TikTok Shop and Instagram Shop. Increasingly, major retailers such as Amazon and Walmart are collaborating with social publishers to enable direct purchasing within social apps.
2. Broader commerce journey: Beyond hosting transactions, social media shapes the entire consumer journey, whether through influencing purchases that ultimately occur on established retail sites or driving traffic directly to those destinations. Social commerce effectively blurs the lines between content consumption and shopping.

For retail media marketers, this dual nature of social commerce represents a significant opportunity to connect with consumers at multiple touchpoints throughout their shopping journey.

Today’s Fragmented but Connected Retail Landscape

Today’s ecommerce landscape encompasses multiple models, each with unique strengths:

• Marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart dominate with their vast product selection and fulfillment networks. These platforms continue to capture the majority of online spending, offering consumers one-stop shopping experiences.
• Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have carved out their niche by controlling the entire customer experience—from product development to marketing and fulfillment. This model allows brands to build direct relationships with consumers while maintaining higher margins.
• Omnichannel retailers blend physical and digital commerce, leveraging their brick-and-mortar footprint for competitive advantages in fulfillment, returns, and experiential shopping.

The diversification of ecommerce channels now extends beyond traditional websites to include mobile commerce, voice shopping, connected TV commerce, and of course, social commerce. This proliferation of touchpoints creates both opportunities and challenges for retail media marketers seeking to meet consumers wherever they shop.

Content to Cart: How Social Platforms Became Shopping Destinations

Social commerce represents the intersection of social interactions and shopping experiences, enabling consumers to discover, research, and purchase products without leaving their social media apps. Rather than replacing traditional ecommerce, social commerce emerged as a natural extension—recognizing that consumers already use social platforms to influence their purchasing decisions.

This evolution has accelerated as major platforms have integrated native shopping features:

• Instagram Shop and Facebook Marketplace provide browsable product catalogs and checkout functionality
• TikTok Shop leverages short-form video content to drive impulse purchases
• Pinterest has transformed visual inspiration into shoppable pins
• Snapchat’s AR try-on features blend entertainment with shopping

What distinguishes social commerce is how it integrates into consumers’ existing social behaviors, making shopping feel less transactional and more experiential. For retail media marketers, this integration offers powerful new advertising opportunities to connect with consumers in authentic, engaging ways.

Beyond the Buy Button: What Makes Social Commerce Unique

While both traditional ecommerce and social commerce facilitate online purchases, several key characteristics differentiate social commerce for retail media marketers:

• Content-commerce integration blurs the line between entertainment and shopping. Rather than dedicated shopping sessions, consumers encounter products while consuming content, creating more organic discovery opportunities and advertising touchpoints.
• Discovery-based shopping contrasts with the intent-driven nature of traditional ecommerce. While consumers typically visit ecommerce sites with specific purchase goals, social commerce excels at introducing products consumers weren’t actively seeking but find appealing.
• Community engagement and social proof are inherently built into the experience. Comments, likes, shares, and user-generated content provide instant validation that traditional product reviews can’t match in immediacy or authenticity.
• Compressed purchase journeys remove friction between product discovery and conversion. The traditional funnel—awareness to consideration to purchase—becomes compressed when consumers can move from discovery to checkout without leaving their social feed.

Where Traditional Ecommerce Excels

Despite social commerce’s growing importance, traditional ecommerce platforms maintain significant advantages that retail media marketers should leverage:

• Dedicated shopping infrastructure optimized specifically for product browsing and purchasing creates efficient shopping experiences for consumers with high purchase intent.
• Advanced search, filtering, and categorization tools help shoppers efficiently navigate large product catalogs and find exactly what they’re looking for—functionality that remains limited on most social platforms.
• Established trust in checkout processes gives consumers confidence in payment security and order fulfillment, areas where social platforms are still building credibility.
• Comprehensive account systems support order tracking, purchase history, and customer service—providing the post-purchase experience that social commerce is still developing.

The Social Commerce Edge

Social commerce offers unique benefits that complement traditional ecommerce strengths, particularly for advertising effectiveness:

• Reduced friction and impulse purchasing opportunities emerge when consumers can buy immediately upon discovery, without the cooling-off period that occurs when switching to a separate shopping site.
• Native content integration means products appear in environments where consumers are already spending time and attention, eliminating the need to drive traffic to external destinations.
• Influencer partnerships create authentic product demonstrations and recommendations that leverage existing trust relationships with followers.
• Interactive shopping experiences through live streams, AR try-ons, and community-driven shopping events create engagement that static ecommerce sites struggle to match.

Complementary, Not Competitive: Winning Across Channels

Forward-thinking retail media marketers aren’t choosing between ecommerce approaches but are integrating social commerce platforms into their broader digital retail strategy:

• Strategic channel selection involves determining which products perform best on which platforms. Impulse-friendly, visually appealing, or limited-edition products often thrive on social platforms, while more complex or considered purchases may convert better on primary ecommerce sites.
• Cross-channel content approaches maintain consistent brand positioning while adapting formats for each platform’s native experience—from shoppable Instagram posts to TikTok product demonstrations to detailed product pages on the brand website.
• Advertising-driven growth underlies successful social commerce strategies. While organic content can build awareness, it’s paid advertising that drives consistent, scalable results across social platforms and traditional ecommerce sites.
• Data utilization across touchpoints helps retail media marketers understand the complete customer journey, recognizing that discovery may happen on social platforms while final purchase occurs on the main ecommerce site.

Building Your Commerce Strategy

To maximize opportunities across the ecommerce spectrum, retail media marketers should:

• Determine the right channel balance for their specific brand, products, and customers. Not every brand needs to be on every platform, but most can benefit from diversification.
• Allocate advertising resources appropriately across channels based on their role in the purchase journey—whether driving awareness, consideration, conversion, or retention.
• Develop channel-specific creative that respects the native experience of each platform while maintaining consistent brand positioning and messaging.
• Invest in technology infrastructure that unifies data across touchpoints, enabling complete measurement and personalized experiences regardless of where customer interactions occur.

Unlocking Your Omnichannel Commerce Opportunity

The distinction between ecommerce and social commerce isn’t about competing approaches but understanding how these complementary channels serve different parts of the customer journey. By viewing social commerce as a specialized subset within the broader ecommerce ecosystem, retail media marketers can develop strategies that leverage the unique strengths of each channel.

Success in today’s digital retail environment requires breaking down silos between traditional and social commerce to create straightforward customer experiences. The brands that will thrive are those that meet consumers wherever they shop while maintaining a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.

Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform helps retail media marketers connect data and performance media across traditional ecommerce and social commerce channels for informed decisions and optimal returns. By unifying data and workflows across major channels including Google, Amazon Ads, Microsoft, Walmart Connect, Instacart, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, and Meta, we make true omnichannel performance marketing a reality.