Social Commerce AI Glossary

Social commerce covers any purchase experience where the shopping unit is social content — a short video, a live stream, a creator clip, a story — rather than a static product page. Historically confined to platforms like TikTok Shop or Instagram Checkout, it has expanded on-site: brands now run the same shoppable formats on their own domain to keep the traffic, the data and the margin.

On-site social commerce moves the shoppable feed, live stream or reel from the social platform onto the brand's owned domain. The customer buys inside the brand's checkout, the first-party data stays with the brand, and the same content can still be distributed to social channels for reach.

A shoppable video links every frame or moment to specific SKUs. Viewers can add items to cart or check out without leaving the player. On-site, shoppable video usually appears as a scrollable feed on the homepage, category and product pages.

Traditional PDPs rely on a photo carousel and copy. A social PDP embeds creator content, user videos, reviews-as-video and live replays, all directly tied to the SKU. The page still converts through the standard e-commerce checkout — only the top-of-page experience changes.

Live commerce (also called live shopping) is the video equivalent of a home-shopping channel: a scheduled or spontaneous stream where products are pinned, added to cart and checked out live. Recordings are usually cut into short shoppable clips afterwards — one live show becomes weeks of on-site and social content.

Reels and stories are the native short-form formats of Instagram, TikTok and Snap. Bringing the same UX on-site — vertical player, swipe navigation, tap-to-buy — makes site content feel native to a scrolling audience.

When customers watch a shoppable video on TikTok, TikTok owns the data. When they watch the same video on the brand's site, the brand owns it. First-party social data feeds personalisation, retargeting, CRM and merchandising without depending on third-party cookies or platform ad panels.

Creator commerce treats creators as always-on merchandising: their videos, lives and clips are ingested, tagged with SKUs and republished on-site as shoppable content. The same asset works as an ad on TikTok and as a hero unit on the PDP.

Social commerce AI is what turns a library of raw video into a scalable merchandising system: automatic SKU tagging, decisioning about which video to show which visitor, and measurement of view-to-cart and view-to-purchase — all without a manual editor tagging every clip.

Video commerce is the umbrella; social commerce is the subset where the video looks and feels native to social platforms (vertical, short, personality-led).

UGC is one of the highest-converting inputs to a social commerce program: it is cheap, authentic and endlessly renewable. Modern social commerce platforms ingest UGC directly, tag it against SKUs, and place it on PDPs and category pages.

View-to-cart is to shoppable video what click-through rate is to a paid ad. Alongside view-to-purchase and average order value, it tells you whether a piece of content is doing commercial work or just entertaining.

A co-pilot in this context is the decisioning brain on top of a content library and a shopper graph. It removes the manual scheduling and tagging work that has kept enterprise brands from scaling social commerce on-site.