Perspective · January 13, 2026 · 5 min
Social Commerce Is Becoming Commerce
Discovery, consideration and checkout are collapsing into the same surface. Most operating models still treat them as three teams.
Buying behaviour has moved inside feeds and creators. For some categories the first and last touch now happen without a website involved at all, which breaks a lot of comfortable assumptions about attribution and ownership.
The commercial risk is not missing a platform. It is running social as a marketing cost line while it becomes a trading channel with its own margin, returns profile and service load.
Treat it like a channel P&L: proposition, assortment, pricing, fulfilment, service, economics. If nobody can tell you its contribution margin, it is not being run.
Written by Arfan Sabir — transformation, growth and digital commerce.
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