.jpg)
TL;DR – Your customer is no longer searching for products. They’re discovering them mid-scroll. AI is accelerating that discovery, collapsing the buying journey into seconds. But while it gets you seen faster, it doesn’t build trust any faster. Most shoppers still double-check, compare, and often return to your website before buying. So, the real question is not how you get attention, but whether your business is built to convert and retain it once it arrives.
Every morning, before the day properly begins, your customer is already inside a marketplace.
Picture this. In January 2026, Malaysian beverage chain Tealive’s “OG Big Bang” livestream officially shrunk the distance between entertainment and six-figure GMV to zero. With 4,000+ items sold over a 12-hour livestream and a 21.93% conversion rate, they bypassed the search bar entirely, challenging the storefront as we know it.
This shift raisesd several eyebrows and a critical question: once you get the click, do you have the infrastructure to keep the customer? Over two-thirds of shoppers now buy through social media at least once a month, making social apps the new front door. No Google. No overhyped AI instant checkouts. No conscious decision. The website isn’t always where the journey begins anymore.
And this is precisely what Tealive capitalized on.
Using a carnival-style studio, top creators, and exclusive eVoucher deals flashing on screen, they created entertainment with a checkout button. As thousands tapped, those eVouchers integrated seamlessly from online to offline, redeemable across 800+ physical outlets without friction.
Their point was that by the time a customer sees dancing creators and countdown timers, the “Buy” button needs to be right there, sandwiched between perhaps a recipe video and a dog doing tricks.
In 2025, global social commerce hit roughly $821 billion. By 2028, it’s expected to cross the $1 trillion mark. That is way too big of a number to be called a “trend.” Frankly, this is a readily accessible opportunity.
And not surprisingly, Gen Z is leading the charge. A 2025 Shopify survey found that 76% of them discover products on social media first. On any given day, they’re scrolling TikTok, watching someone cook pasta in a tiny pan, and thinking, “wait... I actually need that tiny pan.”
That scroll-stopping moment is the algorithm manufacturing intent in real time.
It’s where AI acts as the invisible mastermind, predicting what a consumer will click. But as sleek as that operation sounds, the reality of social commerce is much more chaotic and unpredictable than the hype suggests.
Awareness -> consideration -> intent -> purchase. At its core lay the assumption consumers actually knew what they wanted and went looking for it.
But intent has long taken a backseat.
For merchants, though, this provides additional opportunities to scale. Social feeds have become personalized malls where your store has to reach the customer. Shopify data shows that businesses with a strong social presence see roughly 32% higher sales on average. Not because demand suddenly increased, but because the friction between intent (even if manufactured) and purchase has reduced massively.
And while it feels slightly suspicious and counterintuitive, there’s rarely a push back. Because it’s personalized, convenient, and seamlessly replaces decision-making with momentum.
About 41% of consumers have bought something just because an AI tool recommended it.
But, at the same time, they also double-check AI advice like it’s a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
So, they might discover your product on TikTok or Instagram, but before the final transaction, they’ll probably sneak over to your website, check whether the cart looks right, and if the return policy is visible.
If you map what the buying journey looks like today with social commerce and AI stitched into it, it compresses into something like this:
Scroll -> See product -> Peer validation -> Buy
Apps like TikTok have the “Buy Now” option on a product sticker without a viewer ever having to leave a livestream. Instagram Shops work the same. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are experimenting with AI chatbots that can answer questions and take orders.
In theory, it looks like avoiding unnecessary hassle.
But in practice, it is much more complex. When Walmart tried an AI-powered chatbot checkout, in-chat purchases converted only about one-third as often as normal website sales. Shoppers found it unsatisfying. This whole process stripped away the familiar cues of a shopping site: product info pages, cart summaries, trust signals.
AI can remove touchpoints, but these touchpoints are very much tied to human habits. Consumers still want to read reviews. They still want to see if that influencer they low-key trust actually uses the thing.
With social commerce, brands have unpredictably scaled to seven figures off a single TikTok video. Come to think of it, one entrepreneur’s unhinged 30-second clip can turn into thousands of orders because the algorithm found the audience.
Back in 2025, e.l.f. Cosmetics blew up. Already a budget beauty staple, they doubled down on chaotic TikTok videos with dupe hacks with over-the-top reactions, GRWM disasters pitting $5 concealers against luxury, unhinged lip-syncs - turned @elfyeah into a 2.8M-follower beast.
Instead of polished routines, they leaned into absurd self-care that seamlessly fit into the chaos of everyday life.
TikTok fast-tracked them to $1.3B net sales (up 28%), 16 quarters of growth, billions of #EyesLipsFace views, and celeb shoutouts.
In this instance, social commerce, as a distribution lever, proved to be both well-timed and perfectly suited to a platform driven by attention, not intent.
But the flip side to the viral dream is the reality of an audience in perpetual attention deficit and the patience of a five-year-old. While AI amplifies your brand voice, if what you’re saying cannot be authenticated, people will just scroll past.
Or worse, roast you in the comments.
AI is a force multiplier and an iterative tool. It doesn’t fix a broken strategy.
So here are some actionable steps to prepare your business to scale social commerce:
Social platforms are not interchangeable, and using AI to decode them makes their differences even sharper.
Finally, your own site now acts like social feed too. Google and Shopify are integrating social algorithms for product feeds on websites (Universal Commerce Protocol, etc.). These AI channels still direct customers back to your checkout.
The idea is to adapt your content and experience to each platform’s culture. Don’t blast the same ad everywhere and hope for the best.
For any ecommerce business, the goal should be to make social commerce part of the business’s foundation. To bring that into action, here’s what you must do:
And double down on authenticity. The human element that turns interest into trust doesn’t scale with code. It scales with consistency over time. Stay true to your brand voice. If humor is your thing, let AI help craft a meme-worthy video. But don’t abandon the humor when the next trend soars.
When it works, social commerce becomes a loop: data informs AI targeting, AI delivers an authentic message, people buy and create more content, which feeds back into the system.
AI can inject your product into someone’s day before they even know they want it. That is its superpower. But the final leap into the cart? Can it build retention? That still requires a flicker of trust, a gut feeling of authenticity, a moment of “yeah, this feels right.”
The hype imagined a world where AI could handle the whole transaction. The reality is more nuanced. If social commerce is a story of attention, then authenticity will decide how the story ends as much as algorithmic intelligence will.
And that’s a much better plot twist.
