The Social Storefront Dilemma (1/2)

Within our last blog posts we learned some fundamental things characterizing social commerce. Summing it up briefly: Social Commerce offers unlimited storefronts to let users discover, experience and purchase products! In this blog post we want to dive deeper into the implications of those infinite virtual shopping streets.

Hearing the term "unlimited social storefront" is great as it solves a huge challenge for physical storefronts. If you wanted to be successful back in the times, you better have a storefront at the high-street, otherwise you struggled in reaching potential customers and letting them discover your products. Social platforms solve this challenge as brands are able to build their own social storefront without major limitations.

However the biggest strength of this unlimited social storefront is also its biggest challenge: It is not limited for anyone. Since there are virtually no barriers to entry, every brand, big or small, can utilize this potential to engage with customers and let them experience the brand and products. These substantially lowered barriers to entry also mean that competition moved from the group of shops which clustered around high-street to a national, regional or even global set of players.

To have the ability to showcase brand and products is great, it will not lead to anything by itself though. You need to reach the right people and catch their attention as well. But with our attention being limited, this is the much harder part. On the one hand our attention is limited naturally, as there are only 24h a day of which a large part is already consumed by activities like sleep and work. On the other hand, platforms are actively managing how we "spend" our attention and there is a good reason for that. The time we are spending on their properties and the attention we are offering are the most valuable resources the platforms have. Our data for example is also highly valuable, however, this is mainly a product of us spending our attention. Keeping in mind how most platforms finance themselves, namely advertising, it is obvious why they are actively limiting organic reach.

Of course we are all commercial beings and we prefer to get stuff for free! However there is a significant upside to paying social media platforms for ads. Advertisers are not just getting more reach, they get equipped with much better ways of addressing and capturing users attention. Hence getting real opportunities to overcome the social storefront dilemma!​

If you want to learn more about the advertising possibilities social media platforms are offering, come by and read our next blog post!

Stay cmmrcl.ly impactful!