• by Colin Kirkland , February 12, 2025

LOS ANGELES, CA -- “Social commerce” may not seem like a new concept to marketers who witnessed the rise of QVC, eBay, Amazon, Shopify and the proliferation of easy-to-make D2C websites.

But social commerce is novel, in the sense that it fuses all of these preceding shopping experiences, while driving sales within the walls of a more modern format: social media.

It's a simple concept with massive potential, according to recent data. For example, eMarketer recently reported that social commerce is on track to be a $100 billion industry in the U.S. this year, with an estimated $71.6 billion in purchases made in 2024.

Globally, it is expected to encompass $2.9 trillion dollars in transactions by 2026.

Beyond TikTok Shop's success over the holiday season and social platforms’ rapid investment in shopping functionality, brands, platforms, agencies and creators are also taking note, helping sell out SoCom, the first dedicated social-commerce conference in the U.S. last Thursday in Venice, California.

SoCom, hosted by Orca -- a social commerce company that sold the first product on TikTok Shop --  attracted an eclectic mix of creators, agency leaders, brand executives, retailers, ecommerce platforms and marketers for a day of workshops and presentations that explored the potential promise of social commerce, best practices within the space, and more.

Here are some highlights from the day's workshops and discussions, and its plethora of speakers including keynote speaker Malik Ducard.

Orca co-founder Max Benator kicked off the day on the main stage with a live video from Orca seller and social media influencer Eden Marquis selling beauty products backstage at this year’s New York Fashion Show, addressing questions and comments from her followers in real time.

As Marquis watched from the SoCom audience, Benator, in his Nikes and Big Lebowski cowichan sweater, attempted to highlight social commerce’s unique position in the shopping economy -- a QVC on the go, (on steroids). He reminded the crowd that “it’s not just a big opportunity, it’s big business,” citing the industry's expected 22.4% growth jump this year. 

Creators are key

Not surprisingly, creators were a major focus of SoCom’s programming. As Taryn Hicks, a creator with over 1 million followers on Instagram, stated in the day's first panel, social commerce is turning creators into “brand ambassadors, direct sellers and business owners” who are delivering a service to brands by “providing solutions” for their customers.

Lauren Celinski, content and community lead at YouTube Shopping, added that utilizing creators’ expertise is “not pushing a sale, it's not driving a product,” but “thrives on the relationship between the creator and their audience…it’s about trust.”

This sentiment, which revolves around the cherished ideal of “authenticity,” was embraced by a multitude of creators, brand and agency leaders, and retailers throughout the day.

“The brands that are really winning are the ones embracing creators as fans, not as brand ambassadors,” said Orca’s Senior Vice President of Client Success Khudor Annous.

According to Celinski, creators don’t want a brand to ask them to stick to a script. This, in fact, is a massive pitfall, as it can “immediately” kill authenticity and ruin trust between a creator, the brand and the audience.

Later in the day, brand executives also weighed in. Stacey Tank, CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands, said that the company has decided to fully trust creators, despite the risks.

“We have completely let our hands off the wheel in terms of user-generated content…if you show up every day who you are [as a brand], and things go sideways, I've seen the community get into it, but typically we are okay,” Tank said.

“You can make it worse a lot of the time by trying to put your foot down and asserting yourself,” she added, also stating that smaller growth-face companies, like Bespoke, are able to take more risks.

Audiences deliver a 'clear demand'

One major takeaway from SoCom was how many brands both large and small create and sell products directly based on feedback derived from their social-media audiences.

Tank -- who is “on TikTok an embarrassing amount of times each day,” and believes brand leaders “have to be on the platforms your brand is most active and popular on” -- said Bespoke developed and launched a bestselling pink version of a popular product in response to livestream comments asking “Why don’t you have pink?”

Katie Babineau, CMO at Beyond Yoga, added that the athleisure brand discovered a “clear demand” for capri-focused workout styles through commentary on its social accounts and within six weeks created a new line, went to market and sold out

“Surround yourself with people who will give you brutally honest feedback,” Tank instructs brands.

To help reenergize Gap, a 56-year-old legacy brand, the retailer’s newest CMO Fabiola Torres said the company worked with 24-year-old creator Julia Huynh, who at the time had 1 million followers on TikTok and 248,000 on Instagram.

After discovering Huynh through her TikTok-based quest for a “hoodie that hoodies,” the company invited Huynh to the Gap offices to work exclusively with in-house designers to co-create a custom hoodie.

This was Gap’s first-ever creator-collaboration, and it highlights the brand’s deepening investment in social-first strategies and product sales.

Platforms and formats for the ROAS win

With product sales on social channels growing twice as fast as general commerce, agency leaders discussed how they are improving return on ad spend (ROAS) through utilizing social commerce advertising across a variety of platforms, not all of which are equal in delivering welcome results.

Prior to the sell-off law being signed into law by former president Joe Biden, TikTok Shop was highly successful in terms of delivering results for agencies without breaking the bank.

“We find on TikTok that shoppable campaigns tend to perform best,” said Ethan Kramer, president of marketing agency Agital. “But you don't get the customer data,” which could prove difficult for larger brands' long-term ad strategies.

Kramer said that while YouTube has “all the pieces” in place for social commerce, with promising watch time and ad performance, “they haven’t really put them all together just yet.”

Meta, however, has yet to provide advertisers with a way to optimize for social commerce. With no closed-loop affiliate payment system and deficient product-tagging, Kramer believes Meta is still “more of a website performance solution” and will continue to charge higher prices for ads, as long as the tech giant has “a chokehold on our attention.”

According to Kramer and Thomas Carter, director of paid media at agency MomentIQ, TikTok Shop live streams seem to drive promising top-of-funnel results.

While it could take weeks or months to convert viewers, creator-led live streams provide brands with an important and multifaceted engagement touchpoint.

“We cut out clips from our live streams and run them as normal ads and they do really well,” said Carter.

“We like founder-driven lives and live hosts that are specialized in this,” Kramer said, adding that founder-driven lives help tell a brand’s story in different ways. Kramer believes that it is crucial to invest in content -- that if the content is good, brands will see a lower-cost per acquisition, regardless of the platform.

Agencies wanted (by TikTok Shop)

Toward the end of the day, Jeff Lee, business development lead at TikTok Shop U.S., made his point very clear to the small group seated in a smaller room upstairs: In 2025, “we want to incubate more agencies to work with us.”

Despite the platform's uncertainty in the U.S., Lee said, agency partnerships are slated to be a major contributor to TikTok Shop's expected growth this year -- a sales increase of three or four times.

“We would love to work with local U.S. agencies, figure out what your needs are and how we can work together moving forward,” Lee said, pitching the platform’s closed-loop solution to agencies that manage creators and have a strong understanding of affiliates.

Lee's quick and direct presentation built off of an earlier panel featuring the platform’s Head of Creator Agency Partnerships, Matt Koelsch, who said that agency partnerships help TikTok Shop scale by supporting different user demographics and geographic markets.

“Agency feedback is critical for us to make decisions we make about which products we offer agencies,” Koelsch stated, citing the newness of social commerce as an industry.