Social Media Shopping - Online consumer trend 2019

Physical shopping is an experience, but online with many webshops it is more the experience as if you walk into the warehouse. Grids with the same type of products, filters for boring product properties. The trend social media shopping combines social media with e-commerce in a low-threshold way that appeals to young people in particular. This is how you click from an Instagram post to the webshop with Instagram shoppable posts, instead of walking with difficulty with that one bio-link. This is also in TapTok, a popular Chinese app known previously Musical.ly, a media app for creating and sharing short videos with karaoke, challenges, dances and comedy. Chinese internet celebrities, so-called wanghong, use TikTok to sell Alibaba products (specifically: subsidiary TaoBao).

The adoption speed worldwide is unprecedentedly fast: in 2017 TikTok beat Snapchat in number of users and in 2018 it was the fourth most downloaded app worldwide, above Instagram and YouTube. TikTok is extremely popular among Generation Z. The Dutch Lisa and Lena, for example, already have 32.7 million fans.

This is one of nine online consumer trends 2019. Read all nine consumer trends here: The year of Standardization.