Whats Happening With Social Media Shopping in 2025?
(Updated for 2025: Originally published in 2021)
By Myra | Last Updated: 21 February 2025
Social media shopping has evolved dramatically since we first wrote about it in 2021. Platforms have shifted, TikTok Shop has exploded, and privacy concerns have grown, especially in the UK. This updated article reflects the latest trends, winners, losers, and what the future holds for e-commerce on social media.
From Window Shopping to Infinite Scroll: A Retail Revolution
In 2021, social shopping was a side street — a shortcut from influencer post to product page. Today, it is the whole map, a landscape where discovery, entertainment, and checkout blend into a single flow.
This is not e-commerce as we knew it. It is retail as performance — shopping shaped by the mood of the feed, the rhythms of live drops, the ambient hum of likes, comments, and influencer whispers.
It feels less like browsing and more like drifting through a market that rebuilds itself with every swipe — part arcade, part theatre, part group chat.
TikTok: The Digital Bazaar
TikTok’s dominance is not just a matter of features. It is about atmosphere — a sensory storm that turns every product into a story and every story into a potential sale.
- Sight: Products flash by in unpolished videos — makeup smudged under fluorescent bathroom lights, trainers thudding onto pavements, kitchen gadgets in greasy action — creating a sense of intimate immediacy.
- Sound: Narrated hauls, whispered recommendations, the sharp snap of packaging, the rustle of unboxings — TikTok shopping sounds like friends gossiping, not brands marketing.
- Touch: You feel the texture second-hand — the squish of a cleansing balm, the stiff snap of a new zip, the brittle edges of fast fashion denim — each sensation passed through the screen like digital synaesthesia.
This visceral quality matters. TikTok doesn’t just show you products. It makes you feel them, part of a shared sensory experience looping endlessly between creator and audience.
It echoes the rise of televised shopping channels in the 1980s, when late-night hosts would fondle jewellery and flip kitchen knives under hot studio lights — but this time, the presenters are your peers, and the stage is your feed.
And underpinning it all: the shopsumer revolution, where every user can be both customer and merchant. The platform itself has become a vast, participatory shopping floor — alive, messy, magnetic.
Instagram & Facebook: The Department Store Dilemma
If TikTok is a street market buzzing with energy, Instagram and Facebook feel more like a department store after hours — polished, well-stocked, but slightly out of sync with the crowd outside.
Instagram’s AI product recommendations are almost clairvoyant, sensing your evolving tastes with eerie precision. Products appear like whispers from your subconscious, your aspirational self mirrored back through the glass of the algorithm.
The transactions are frictionless — thanks to Shop Pay, you barely notice you’ve bought something until the confirmation pings. But the process feels curatorial rather than cultural — you are browsing an exhibition, not participating in a scene.
There is a ghost in the machine here, the lingering glamour of Instagram’s heyday, when polished perfection ruled. That perfection now feels a touch too staged, while TikTok’s chaos hums with life.
On Facebook, the story is different — its shops thrive not on coolness, but on trust. Older users stick with what’s familiar. Verified businesses still draw clicks. But as shopping becomes more performative, Facebook’s role shrinks to backstage — the warehouse, not the catwalk.
Pinterest: The Quiet Hunter
Pinterest has never been about spectacle. It is about intention — slow, deliberate discovery, the kind of shopping that starts with a mood and ends with a purchase.
- Sight: Soft focus, curated grids, textures layered gently — linen, oak, ceramic, silk — objects rendered as aesthetic desire.
- Touch: The imagined weight of a hand-thrown mug, the coolness of marble, the warmth of worn leather — Pinterest sells through tactile longing, more gallery than market.
Its Shopping Hub feels less like a feed and more like a living catalogue, tuned to your personal taste. Visual search turns the world into a shoppable mood board — see it, snap it, find it, buy it.
Where TikTok sells impulse, Pinterest sells imagination — the future home, the perfect outfit, the ideal garden — all purchased in service of a personal vision.
YouTube: Shopping Between the Lines
YouTube’s move into shopping is quieter still, but no less potent. It trades on authority and depth, the sense that you are not just buying, you are being educated into buying smartly.
- Sound: Calm narration, product comparisons, the low thud of packaging hitting a table — YouTube shopping sounds like a trusted friend explaining why this one is better than that one.
- Sight: Multi-angle shots, slow pans, honest wear-and-tear close-ups — YouTube doesn’t sell fantasy, it sells expertise.
The Shopping Tab functions like a brand showroom, but the real action happens inside content itself — clickable products appearing mid-video, directly linked to real-time demos and reviews.
If TikTok is a festival, YouTube is a seminar — slower, deeper, focused on the why, not just the want.
Amazon Inspire: The Flatline
And then there was Amazon. Its attempt to break into social shopping — Amazon Inspire — felt like a factory trying to throw a party.
It lacked the sensory layer — the community energy, the feeling that products came wrapped in story and context. Instead, Inspire felt clinical — product after product, no culture, no connection.
It is a reminder that technology alone cannot create culture. Shopping is not just about what we buy, but how it feels to buy it — the anticipation, the discovery, the sense of joining something larger than yourself.
What Happens Next: 2025 and Beyond
Three cultural currents are already shaping what comes next:
The Full Shopsumer Economy: Everyone becomes a seller — influencers, hobbyists, even casual users. Social feeds evolve into distributed marketplaces, with influence as currency and authenticity as collateral.
AI Becomes a Personal Stylist: Recommendation engines will soon track mood shifts, seasonal rhythms, life milestones — understanding your future wants before you do.
The Privacy Reckoning: With Apple scaling back Advanced Data Protection in the UK, the spotlight turns to how much social platforms know about your desires — and whether they deserve that access.
Final Verdict: Winners, Losers, and the New Rules
- Biggest Winner: TikTok — not just for volume, but for turning shopping into a cultural act.
- Strong Contenders: Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube — each holding their niche, but all now reacting to TikTok, not leading.
- Biggest Loser: Amazon — proof that a feed without feeling is just a list.
Shopping as Storytelling
What social commerce teaches us is simple: we do not buy products, we buy participation — in trends, in stories, in cultural moments that feel bigger than ourselves.
The platforms that understand this — the ones that make shopping feel like a shared cultural act — will own the future.
This is not just retail evolution. This is commerce as culture, every transaction a tiny story, every product a prop in the scene we call life online.
Are you ready to sell where you scroll — and shop where you belong?
