- LTK is relaunching its app on Thursday to add new social features and expand beyond shopping.
- Other social-commerce apps like Flip have similarly moved into general entertainment.
- The companies are stepping up efforts to blend entertainment and shopping as they chase users.
For social-shopping apps, commerce alone isn’t cutting it.
LTK, a platform that lets users buy products from creator videos and posts, is relaunching its app on Thursday to encourage more everyday content from its users.
“We’re moving from being a shopping app to really being a lifestyle app,” Amber Venz Box, cofounder of LTK, told Business Insider.
LTK’s new feed lets users discover videos by geography and topic, such as fashion, parenting, cooking, and travel. It still wants creators to tag items in videos (that’s how the company and its affiliate partners make money), but it hopes they’ll vlog about other parts of their lives without any intent to push products.
The app also plans to roll out more strictly social features, like the ability to connect with friends.
It’s not the only commerce platform looking to broaden its appeal in recent months. Flip, a TikTok-like app once composed purely of videos tagged with products, opened up to other content in July. It now hosts everyday videos it calls clips, which run the gamut from movie scenes to creator-on-the-street interviews and other types of content that would live on a general entertainment platform.
“The idea of social commerce over the last five years was that everyone built it to be a commerce platform where there’s somebody selling you the product,” Flip’s CEO Noor Agha told BI.
Agha said Flip’s clips feature is part of a push to merge entertainment and commerce. “If we cannot solve both, social commerce will never actually go mainstream,” Agha said.
The opportunity is huge for companies in the category that can build an audience, as platforms like TikTok have shown. In a December EMARKETER forecast, the research firm predicted the number of US social-commerce buyers would hit 100 million in 2024, with sales crossing $100 billion in 2026. Social-shopping startups like Whatnot and ShopMy have pulled in tens of millions of dollars in new funding in the past few months as they chase new users.
TikTok made entertainment a must-have in social shopping
The push among shopping apps to add general entertainment is likely a response to the rise of TikTok’s e-commerce platform, Shop. The app built an audience of more than a billion users globally through social entertainment before introducing commerce features.
“A lot of the social-shopping apps are trying to reverse engineer that entertainment component into their apps to make them more sticky and to keep users and audiences coming back,” said Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at EMARKETER covering retail and e-commerce.
Social platforms in the US have spent years testing features to get users to buy stuff in-app, with mixed results. TikTok finally showed that consumers, if prodded enough, would get on board.
Canaves said TikTok has shown that social commerce can work, “but it needs to be grounded in content, and typically that’s entertainment content and creator content.”
Ultimately, that reverse engineering feat may be tough to pull off. In February, Amazon nixed its TikTok-like shopping feed, Inspire, in another sign that shopping-only video feeds lack staying power.
But relying on platforms like TikTok or Instagram for distribution is also risky for startups that don’t want to be subject to the whims of Big Tech. Instagram, for example, has pulled back on commerce features in recent years.
LTK recently partnered with TikTok to integrate affiliate links within the TikTok app. But TikTok generally keeps its e-commerce features in-house. The company’s future in the US is also uncertain due to a divest-or-ban law that targets the company and its owner ByteDance.
For social-shopping startups, building an entertainment platform where they can control everything may be the best path forward.
Putting social in social commerce
Making shopping feel more social is key to retaining users and growing an app’s audience. Venz Box said a big part of that is tapping into the relationships users have with brands and the creators themselves.
LTK is encouraging creators to post more lifestyle content to the app so that users feel as connected to the creator on LTK as they do on larger platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
“We started investing in order to be the place that they retain, nurture, and grow their community,” Venz Box said.
Community is a buzzword for social apps overall and has driven several trends in social shopping. Substack has several shopping-focused newsletters with established online and IRL communities. Meanwhile, TYB, a shopping-rewards platform cofounded by apparel brand Outdoor Voices’ Ty Haney, is focused on building and maintaining communities of superfans with challenges and group chats.
Ultimately, every app is fighting for a share of the internet’s most valuable commodity: consumers’ time.
“I am willing to sacrifice that not every piece of content has something to buy in it because the opportunity set is so much larger if you can go deeper with people,” Venz Box said.
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