Social Commerce: Read the Terms Before You Build a Business on Someone Else’s Storefront

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

TikTok Shop, Instagram shopping, YouTube’s product tagging. The pitch is that you can sell where people already are, without making them leave.

That part is true, and it is genuinely a good reason to be there. The part nobody puts in the deck is what you give up in exchange, and I would rather you knew that before you build anything.

What you actually get

Reduced friction, and it is real. A person watching a video can buy without opening a browser, finding your store, and typing a card number on a phone. Every step you remove is people who do not fall out.

Distribution you did not pay for, sometimes. A video can find an audience that no ad budget of yours could have bought. That is a real and occasionally enormous upside.

Both of those are worth having. I am not talking anyone out of social commerce.

What you give up

The customer relationship. This is the one that matters and the one that gets waved past.

When someone buys through a platform storefront, you often do not get an email address you can use, or you get one wrapped in terms about what you may do with it. The platform keeps the relationship. You made the sale and rented the customer.

Compare that to a sale on your own store: you get an email, that person enters your welcome flow, and their second purchase costs you nothing to ask for. On the platform, their second purchase requires the algorithm to show them to you again, which it will do on its terms.

The terms themselves. Fees change. Rules change. A category that is fine this quarter can become restricted next quarter, and the appeal process is a form.

I run marketing in-house for products in restricted niches, where an ad account can be throttled or shut off with no warning and no recourse. That experience makes me read platform terms differently than I used to. Anything you build entirely on someone else’s platform can be switched off by someone who has never heard of you and owes you nothing.

The data. You see what the platform shows you, at the granularity it chooses.

How I would actually use it

Use social commerce as a top-of-funnel that happens to convert, and treat every sale there as an introduction rather than a conclusion.

Get the email into the box. A card, an insert, anything in the physical package that gives them a reason to come to your store and hand over an email. Yes, the platform owns the digital relationship. It does not own what you put in the parcel.

Make the second purchase happen on your turf. That insert should point to something worth having: a replenishment reminder, a related product, an actual reason. Once they are on your list, the relationship is yours and nobody can revoke it.

Do not build your only storefront there. Have your own store, always, even if it does less volume. It is the thing that stays on.

What I am not going to tell you

I am not going to give you social commerce growth projections, market size figures, or conversion benchmarks for TikTok Shop.

You will see all of those quoted with great confidence. I went looking for the sources under this genre of statistic recently and found mostly AI-written pages citing each other, disagreeing wildly, with no methodology anywhere. I would rather tell you nothing than repeat a number I cannot stand behind.

What I can tell you is the structural trade, and the trade does not change with the market size: lower friction now, in exchange for a relationship you do not own.

The rule I would hold to

Sell wherever people want to buy. Own the follow-up everywhere.

If a channel does not let you own the follow-up, that channel is a customer acquisition cost, not a customer relationship. Price it accordingly, and put a card in the box.