Social commerce
Shopping that happens inside social posts, creator content, or profiles instead of sending the buyer to a separate store.
See it
What it is
Social commerce is shopping carried by a social platform itself: discovery in a post, video, livestream, or creator profile, followed by product selection and purchase without treating the brand's website as the main journey. TikTok Shop is the blunt version of it: content, product tags, creator promotion, and checkout live in the same app.
Reach for it when products are easy to understand on sight and creators or customer content already drive discovery. The catalog, price, stock, orders, and returns still need to stay in step with the main store, even when the social platform owns the storefront surface.
Gotcha: a social sale is still a real order. Inventory drift causes overselling, mismatched variants cause wrong-item returns, and weak order import leaves support unable to find the purchase. Treat each platform as a sales channel over one catalog, not as a second catalog maintained by hand.
Ask AI for it
Build a TikTok Shop-style social commerce channel for this store. Map each channel listing to an existing product variant and SKU, publish price, media, and availability from the product catalog, and ingest channel orders into the same order table with the social platform's order ID as an idempotency key. Render a mobile social feed with creator cards, tagged products, an in-app product sheet, variant selection, and checkout without a detour to a product page. Show sponsorship disclosure beside paid creator content, reserve stock only when checkout starts, and push cancellations, fulfillment status, and tracking back to the channel.