The Social Commerce Race

Social commerce did not exist as a transaction category in 2014. By 2024, it had become a $699B global market. The decade was not a straight line — it was a series of platform bets, retreats, and one latecomer that grew faster than anything before it.

GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) is the total dollar value of goods sold through a platform before fees, refunds and discounts — the standard yardstick for marketplace size. TikTok Shop launched in the US in September 2023 with no US track record and entered a market where Meta had been running native checkout for four years. By year two it had $15.1B in US GMV alone — and was accelerating.

Every major platform faced the same decision: build the checkout inside the app, or keep the discovery and let merchants handle the transaction on their own site. By 2026, only TikTok Shop still runs the full closed loop in Western markets. Meta withdrew after six years because adoption stayed limited and the model never scaled, with merchants citing a lack of control over the in-app checkout flow as a recurring complaint (GoDataFeed). Pinterest never came back to native checkout after retiring Buyable Pins in 2018. YouTube is still building, with no GMV figure published yet.

70% of TikTok users who follow luxury brands have spent £1,000 or more on a single item. The platform has a high-value audience. The question is whether the brands are positioned to meet them.

The UK launched in 2021. Spain followed in December 2024. Germany, Italy and France went live in March 2025. The gap in seller revenue tells the rest of the story.

Instagram first launched a native creator affiliate tool in June 2021 in a closed US beta. Fourteen months later, in August 2022, the company shut it down. The official reason at the time was that the product was "not turnkey" and created too much setup friction for both creators and brands. Internally, a second flaw mattered more: creators inside the program could not tag products outside it, so participating actively shrank their reach with the rest of their audience (Digiday, August 2022).

Between September 2022 and March 2026 Instagram had no native affiliate product, while competitors built deeply entrenched positions in creator commerce: TikTok Shop opened creator commissions in every market it entered, LTK and ShopMy turned the closed-loop creator URL into a category, and YouTube Shopping reached 500,000+ enrolled creators by Q3 2025.

The March 2026 relaunch fits a different model. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, announced creators can tag affiliate products directly in Reels and earn commissions on resulting purchases. Crucially, the system is now open: creators can paste any affiliate URL, including LTK and ShopMy, as long as the product exists in Meta's commerce catalogue (Net Influencer, March 2026). The transaction itself still completes on the merchant's site, in line with Meta's September 2025 retreat from native checkout.