Building a Social Commerce Strategy From Scratch

By 2021, buying directly inside a social app had gone from novelty to genuine infrastructure. Instagram and Facebook Shops, launched the year before, had rolled out to millions of businesses, and Checkout on Instagram, letting US shoppers pay without ever leaving the app, expanded to more sellers throughout the year. TikTok signed a commerce partnership with Shopify in 2021, opening the door for merchants to add shoppable video there too. If you were starting from nothing, here’s the order that made sense.

Step 1: Get your product catalog in order first

Native shopping features pull from a product catalog, usually connected through Facebook Commerce Manager or an ecommerce platform like Shopify. Before touching any social settings, make sure your catalog has clean images, accurate pricing and current inventory, since a broken or outdated catalog undermines every shoppable post built on top of it.

Step 2: Set up Shops on the platforms your customers use

Instagram and Facebook Shops share a backend through Commerce Manager, so setting one up largely sets up the other. Approval isn’t instant, Facebook reviews the catalog and business against its commerce policies, so this step needs to happen well before any launch date, not the week of.

Step 3: Tag products inside organic content, not just ads

Once approved, every organic post, Reel and Story can carry a product tag that opens a mini product page without leaving the app. Brands that treated this as an ongoing habit, tagging relevant products in regular content rather than only in paid campaigns, generated free discovery traffic that ad spend alone couldn’t buy.

Step 4: Decide whether to enable in-app checkout

Checkout on Instagram, where available, lets a shopper complete a purchase entirely inside the app. It reduces friction and improved conversion for brands that had access, but it also means the sale happens outside your own website analytics and email capture flow. Some brands opted to send traffic to their own site instead, trading a bit of friction for more control over the customer relationship and data.

Step 5: Use Stories and Live video as an active selling surface

Product stickers in Stories and shoppable tags in Live video gave brands a way to sell in the moment rather than only through a static shop tab. A limited-time product drop announced through Stories, with a direct tag to buy, consistently outperformed the same product just sitting in the shop grid waiting to be found.

Step 6: Track native sales separately from your website funnel

In-app purchases don’t always show up cleanly in the same analytics as website orders, so brands needed a clear way, whether that was platform-native reporting or coordinated UTM and discount codes, to see how much revenue was coming through social checkout versus a click-through to the site.

Step 7: Review and expand deliberately

Once one platform’s shop was live and generating real, measurable sales, adding a second, TikTok’s Shopify integration or Pinterest’s product pins, made sense. Launching everywhere at once before proving the model on one platform usually just meant three half-maintained shop tabs instead of one that converted.

Social commerce in 2021 rewarded brands that treated the shop tab as an active selling channel with content behind it, not a catalog dump they set up once and forgot.

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Keep exploring: browse more Social Media Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2021 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.