Social Commerce in the US: Why Most Brands Are Playing It Wrong

Social commerce in the United States is growing fast, but most brands are still treating it like a content channel with a checkout button bolted on. The opportunity is real. The execution, for the majority of brands, is not. Understanding the structural difference between a social commerce strategy that generates revenue and one that generates impressions is where the real work starts.

TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout, Pinterest Shopping, and YouTube’s shoppable formats have collectively changed the architecture of how Americans discover and buy products. But the platforms evolving is not the same thing as brands being ready to compete on them. Most are not.

I spent a long time earlier in my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance. When I was managing significant ad spend across multiple accounts, the metrics that got celebrated in client meetings were the ones closest to the sale: ROAS, CPA, conversion rate. It took years of seeing the same pattern repeat across different industries before I accepted what the data was quietly telling me. A lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who was already searching for your product was already close to buying. You captured intent. You did not create it. Social commerce, done properly, is about creating intent. That is a fundamentally different problem.

What Is Social Commerce and Why Does It Matter in the US Market?

Social commerce is the integration of product discovery, consideration, and purchase within social media platforms, without the user needing to leave the app. It is not the same as social media marketing that drives traffic to an e-commerce site. The distinction matters because the psychology of the buyer is different when the friction between discovery and purchase is reduced to a single tap.

The US market has some specific characteristics that make social commerce both a significant opportunity and a more complex environment than, say, China, where the category is more mature. American consumers have high platform literacy but relatively lower tolerance for feeling sold to. They respond to authenticity, peer validation, and creator credibility in ways that traditional advertising does not replicate. The brands winning in US social commerce have understood this. The ones losing are still running ad creative that belongs in a catalogue.

TikTok Shop has accelerated the category significantly, particularly in beauty, fashion, food, and home goods. Instagram and Facebook Shopping remain important for older demographics and for brands with strong existing audiences on Meta. Pinterest continues to punch above its weight in categories where visual inspiration drives purchase decisions. YouTube Shopping is still developing but has structural advantages in longer consideration cycles. Each platform represents a different buyer mindset, and treating them identically is one of the most common and most costly mistakes brands make.

If you are thinking about how social commerce fits into a broader commercial growth model, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider landscape of how brands build sustainable revenue engines, not just isolated channel tactics.

Why Are So Many Social Commerce Programmes Underperforming?

There are a few structural reasons, and they tend to compound each other.

The first is that brands approach social commerce as a distribution problem when it is actually a trust problem. Getting your product listed on TikTok Shop is not the hard part. Getting someone who has never heard of you to stop scrolling, watch your content, believe what they are seeing, and buy within the same session is the hard part. That requires earned credibility, and earned credibility takes time and consistency to build.

The second is misaligned measurement. Brands that are accustomed to last-click attribution models are poorly equipped to evaluate social commerce performance honestly. Discovery happens in one session. Purchase might happen in the same session, or it might happen three days later through a direct search. The platform gets no credit for that. The brand concludes the platform does not work. The platform does work, but the measurement framework is wrong. This is a version of the same problem I have seen across every channel for twenty years: analytics tools give you a perspective on reality, not reality itself.

The third reason is creative. Most brand-produced content for social commerce is too polished, too controlled, and too obviously promotional. The content that converts in social commerce environments tends to look native to the platform, feel personal, and demonstrate the product in context rather than presenting it in a studio. This is uncomfortable for brands that have spent years building visual consistency across channels. But the user does not care about your brand guidelines. They care about whether the product looks like something that will work in their life.

How Do Creator Partnerships Change the Social Commerce Equation?

Creator partnerships are not a nice-to-have in social commerce. For most brands, they are the primary growth lever.

The reason is straightforward. Trust in social commerce transfers from creator to product, not from brand to audience. When a creator with a genuine, engaged following recommends a product, their audience extends a version of the trust they have built with that creator to the product itself. That is not something a brand can replicate with its own content, no matter how well produced. The brand is always selling. The creator, at their best, is sharing.

This dynamic is well understood in theory but poorly executed in practice. Brands either over-control the creative, stripping out the authenticity that made the creator worth working with in the first place, or they treat creator partnerships as a one-off campaign tactic rather than a sustained relationship. Neither approach builds the compounding trust that drives meaningful social commerce revenue.

The brands that are genuinely winning in US social commerce tend to have a portfolio of creator relationships at different scales: a small number of larger creators for reach and credibility, a larger number of mid-tier creators for category authority, and a long tail of micro-creators for specific niches and communities. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market strategies is worth reviewing if you are building out this kind of programme, particularly around how creator selection intersects with conversion intent rather than just reach metrics.

I judged the Effie Awards over multiple cycles, and one of the consistent patterns I saw in the entries that performed commercially was that the brands willing to cede creative control to external voices, whether that was creators, communities, or customers, tended to generate more genuine commercial impact than those that maintained tight brand control throughout. That is a difficult lesson for brand managers who have spent years protecting consistency. But consistency and relevance are different things, and in social commerce, relevance wins.

What Does a Social Commerce Strategy Actually Require?

A social commerce strategy requires four things that most brands either skip or underinvest in: platform selection discipline, content infrastructure, creator relationship management, and honest measurement.

Platform selection discipline means choosing where to compete based on where your buyer actually is and how they behave on that platform, not where you already have a following or where your competitors happen to be. Being present on every platform is not a strategy. It is a resource drain that produces mediocre performance everywhere instead of strong performance somewhere. The brands I have seen get this right tend to make a deliberate choice to dominate one or two platforms before expanding. The ones that spread themselves thin rarely build the platform-specific expertise needed to compete effectively.

Content infrastructure means having a production capability that can generate platform-native content at the volume and velocity that social commerce requires. This is not the same as having a content team that produces brand assets. Social commerce content needs to be faster, more iterative, more willing to fail, and more responsive to what is actually resonating. Many brands are structurally set up to produce ten pieces of polished content a month when they need to be testing fifty pieces of rough content a week.

Creator relationship management is an operational capability that most brands have not built. It requires clear briefing processes that protect the creator’s voice, fair commercial structures that incentivise performance without creating perverse incentives, and a genuine willingness to build long-term relationships rather than transactional campaigns. The brands that treat creators like media placements tend to get media-placement results: reach without trust.

Honest measurement is the hardest part. It requires acknowledging that social commerce generates value that is not always visible in platform attribution windows, building measurement frameworks that account for assisted conversions and brand-building effects, and being willing to make investment decisions based on directional evidence rather than precise attribution. Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder right now touches on some of the structural measurement challenges that are making this more difficult across the board, not just in social commerce.

How Does Social Commerce Fit Into a Broader Go-To-Market Model?

Social commerce is not a standalone channel. It sits within a broader commercial system, and how it connects to the rest of that system determines whether it generates sustainable revenue or just spikes of activity that do not compound.

The brands that integrate social commerce most effectively tend to think about it in terms of audience development first and transaction volume second. They use social commerce platforms to reach audiences that would not have found them through search or direct channels, build relationships with those audiences through consistent creator-led content, and convert a portion of that audience into buyers over time. The conversion is important, but it is downstream of the audience development. Without the audience development, you are just paying for reach that does not stick.

This connects to something I have come to believe more strongly over time. A lot of performance marketing captures demand that already exists. It does not create new demand. Social commerce, when it works, creates new demand by putting products in front of people who were not looking for them and making those products feel relevant and desirable. That is a much harder thing to do than capturing existing intent, but it is also much more valuable in terms of long-term growth. It is the difference between finding customers who were already going to buy from someone and creating customers who would not have bought at all without the discovery moment.

Think about a physical clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is significantly more likely to buy than someone who just browses. Social commerce, at its best, is the digital equivalent of getting the product into someone’s hands. The creator demonstrates it in context. The viewer imagines it in their own life. The purchase follows from the imagination, not from a search query. That is a different kind of commercial value, and it requires a different kind of investment logic to evaluate fairly.

Understanding how social commerce connects to wider growth architecture is something we cover in depth across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of The Marketing Juice. If you are trying to build a coherent commercial growth model rather than just optimising individual channels, that is a good place to start.

What Are the Specific Platform Dynamics Brands Need to Understand?

TikTok Shop operates on a discovery-first model where the algorithm surfaces content to users based on engagement signals, not follower relationships. This means a brand with a small following can reach a large audience if its content generates strong engagement. The implication is that content quality and relevance matter more than audience size, and that brands need to produce enough content to give the algorithm sufficient signal to work with. The affiliate programme, where creators earn a commission on sales they drive, has also created a large pool of motivated content producers who will promote products they genuinely like. This is a structural advantage that brands should be actively using rather than treating as a threat to brand control.

Instagram Shopping benefits from a more established trust infrastructure. Users are more accustomed to seeing brand content on Instagram, and the shopping integration is smoother for categories with strong visual appeal. The challenge is that organic reach on Instagram has declined significantly over time, which means social commerce on Instagram increasingly requires either paid amplification or strong creator partnerships to generate meaningful discovery. Brands that built large organic Instagram followings five years ago should not assume those followings translate into social commerce performance today.

Pinterest Shopping is underused by most brands despite strong evidence that Pinterest users have high purchase intent in specific categories. Home, fashion, beauty, food, and weddings are categories where Pinterest users are actively planning purchases, which means the discovery-to-purchase cycle can be relatively short. The platform’s search functionality also means that social commerce on Pinterest has some characteristics of search intent capture as well as discovery, which makes it a useful bridge between the two models.

YouTube Shopping is still developing its commerce infrastructure but has structural advantages for products that benefit from longer-form demonstration. High-consideration purchases, technical products, and anything that requires education before purchase are well suited to YouTube’s format. The challenge is that YouTube content production is more resource-intensive than short-form content, which raises the barrier to entry.

What Should Brands Be Measuring in Social Commerce?

The honest answer is that most brands are measuring the wrong things, or measuring the right things in the wrong way.

Platform-reported ROAS is a starting point, not a conclusion. It captures in-platform conversions within a defined attribution window and misses everything else: the person who discovered the product on TikTok and bought on Amazon two days later, the person who saw a creator post and searched for the brand directly, the person who added to cart and bought a week later. None of these are invisible in aggregate, but they are invisible in platform reporting.

A more honest measurement framework for social commerce includes: in-platform conversion data as one input, branded search volume as a proxy for awareness and consideration, direct traffic trends, new customer acquisition rate (not just revenue), and qualitative signals like creator comment sentiment and product review velocity. None of these individually gives you the full picture. Together, they give you a more defensible approximation of what is actually working.

Tools that help you understand user behaviour and conversion paths, rather than just attributing credit to the last touchpoint, are worth investing in. Hotjar’s work on growth loops and user feedback is one example of how qualitative signals can complement quantitative data in building a more complete picture of what is driving commercial outcomes.

The temptation in social commerce measurement is to demand the same precision you might expect from paid search. That precision is not available, and demanding it leads to underinvesting in channels that are generating real value but cannot prove it within a narrow attribution window. The goal is honest approximation, not false precision. That is a harder standard to hold to in a boardroom conversation, but it is the intellectually honest one.

How Should Brands Think About Scaling Social Commerce?

Scaling social commerce is a different challenge from scaling paid media. In paid media, you can increase spend and expect a reasonably predictable increase in output, at least up to a point. In social commerce, the constraints are not primarily financial. They are creative, relational, and operational.

The creative constraint is that you need more content, and more content that works, not just more content. Scaling content production without scaling content quality produces diminishing returns quickly. The brands that scale social commerce effectively tend to build content systems rather than just content teams: clear frameworks for what works on each platform, rapid testing and iteration processes, and creator relationships that generate a continuous pipeline of authentic content without requiring constant brand intervention.

The relational constraint is that creator relationships do not scale in the same way that media buys do. You cannot simply increase your creator budget and expect proportional results. You need to build a portfolio of relationships at different scales, manage those relationships with care, and resist the temptation to treat creators as interchangeable media units. The ones who build genuine audiences do so because they are selective about what they promote. If you undermine that selectivity by pushing them to produce too much content or too many brand messages, you erode the thing that made them valuable in the first place.

The operational constraint is internal. Most marketing teams are not structured to operate at the speed and volume that effective social commerce requires. Approval processes designed for quarterly campaign cycles are incompatible with the iterative, always-on nature of social commerce. Brands that scale this effectively tend to have made deliberate structural changes to how their marketing function operates, not just added headcount. Forrester’s thinking on agile scaling is relevant here, even if the context is broader than social commerce specifically.

When I grew one agency from 20 people to 100, the operational bottlenecks were never where I expected them to be. The creative output scaled. The client management scaled. The thing that consistently broke was the internal decision-making architecture. Approvals, sign-offs, and review processes designed for a smaller, slower operation became the constraint on everything else. Social commerce teams face the same problem. The platform moves fast. The brand’s internal processes do not. Closing that gap is an organisational challenge as much as a marketing one.

For a broader framework on how growth strategies need to evolve as organisations scale, Semrush’s breakdown of growth examples across different business models provides useful context on the structural choices that tend to separate sustainable growth from unsustainable spikes.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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