I have a soft spot for the old funnel.

It was neat. It was organized. It gave everybody the emotional comfort of pretending buyers moved in straight lines.

Then the internet did what the internet does and made that model look adorable.

According to EMARKETER’s US Social Commerce Forecast 2026, social commerce is increasingly driven by creator-led shopping and younger buyers, and more than half of US social buyers are expected to shop on TikTok this year. That is not just “social discovery.” That is discovery, persuasion, and purchase getting squished into one scroll.

The old version looked like this:

See ad.
Read site.
Compare options.
Maybe ask a friend.
Come back later.
Buy.

The new version looks more like this:

See creator.
Watch demo.
Read comments.
Get social proof.
Tap product.
Buy before your coffee gets cold.

That is a different motion.

And it changes what matters.

I think social commerce works when three things happen at the same time:

That combination is powerful because it removes most of the friction that used to sit between curiosity and transaction.

You do not need a perfect website experience to capture the moment. You need momentum.

One reason this works so well is that creators compress trust.

They do some of the work that brand sites, reviews, and salespeople used to do.

That’s why EMARKETER’s creator economy coverage matters here too. The creator economy is getting bigger, more competitive, and more measurable at the exact moment social platforms are turning into shopping infrastructure.

That is not a coincidence.

Creators are no longer just reach partners. They are conversion infrastructure.

I love anything that shortens the distance between proof and action.

What I do not love is when teams treat a new channel like a costume.

They slap product links under mediocre content, call it “social commerce,” and then act shocked when nobody cares.

The format is not the strategy.

If the product is hard to explain, expensive to trust, or annoying to buy, the scroll will punish you instantly.

This matters beyond consumer brands.

Even if you sell software or services, the lesson is useful:

That last point is underrated.

Your sales page is no longer the only place prospects evaluate you. They are evaluating you in public, socially, and in context.

If I were running a brand leaning into social commerce, I’d focus on five things:

Not every SKU deserves social velocity. Some products are made for demonstrations, bundles, before-and-afters, and impulsive purchases. Some are not.

The best creator content does not sound like a creative brief had a baby with legal review. It needs angles, use cases, objections, and real-world context.

If attention dies, everything dies.

Comments are market research wearing sweatpants. They tell you confusion, objections, phrasing, and emotional triggers for free.

The moment somebody wants the thing, do not send them through a maze.

The danger is treating social commerce like infinite arbitrage.

As more brands pile in, cheap wins get rarer. Creative fatigue shows up faster. Trust gets fragile. And platform dependence becomes real.

That means you still need the fundamentals: good product, good positioning, good economics.

Social commerce speeds up the machine. It does not fix a broken one.

The funnel is not dead.

It is just much less polite than it used to be.

Social commerce is teaching marketers that discovery, validation, and purchase can happen in the same place, with the same piece of content, inside the same minute.

Teams that understand that will build for momentum.

Teams that do not, will keep making “awareness content” for a market that already moved on.