Why the next generation of store builders starts on TikTok, Instagram, and chat, not on the homepage.

Social Commerce as the New Default Channel

In 2026, eCom builder apps are being redesigned around a simple reality: shoppers are discovering, evaluating, and increasingly purchasing products without ever visiting a traditional storefront. TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and other social platforms have become full-stack marketplaces where discovery, community, and transaction converge.

Global social commerce sales are forecast to reach well over one trillion dollars by 2025, with TikTok emerging as one of the fastest-growing engines, driving more than twenty-five percent year-on-year gains in U.S. social commerce. Sprout Social+2EMARKETER TikTok Shop’s Black Friday performance, where U.S. sales topped one hundred million dollars in a single day, underscores how quickly livestreams and short-form video have become commerce powerhouses. Business Insider. Recognizing this shift, eCom builder apps now treat social platforms as primary surfaces, not “channels.” Merchants can design shoppable video templates, live event overlays, and creator storefronts directly inside the builder. Product information, inventory levels, and pricing are synchronized in real time across the store, social shops, and marketplace extensions.

Conversational Commerce: Chat as Storefront

Alongside social feeds, conversational channels have matured into full-fledged storefronts. Messaging apps, brand-owned chat widgets, and voice assistants host interactions that begin with simple questions and often end in completed orders. Conversational AI enables these channels to function 24/7 with human-like responsiveness.

Recent data shows that conversational AI in e-commerce is resolving the vast majority of customer questions without human intervention and can drive significantly higher sales through proactive engagement and personalized recommendations. HelloRep+2eDesk During the 2024 holiday season, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants were credited with billions of dollars in AI-influenced sales globally, as shoppers increasingly turned to chat for product discovery and support. Reuters

Modern eCom builder apps embed conversational capabilities at the core. Merchants can configure AI agents to handle FAQs, cross-sell and upsell during conversations, recover abandoned carts via messaging, and even host “chat-based launch events” where limited drops are released through interactive dialogue. The builder app supplies pre-trained templates for verticals such as fashion, consumer electronics, and beauty, while allowing fine-tuning on brand voice and domain-specific knowledge.

Builder Apps as Social and Chat Commerce Hubs

The technical architecture of builder apps is evolving to accommodate this social and conversational reality. Instead of treating the website as the canonical truth and everything else as an integration, the platform now behaves as a hub that synchronizes product, pricing, content, and customer data across multiple front-end surfaces:

Social product tags and live shopping events pull product data directly from the builder’s catalog. Chatbots and messaging apps receive real-time inventory and pricing feeds, along with content such as images, videos, and reviews.
Creator storefronts, hosted by the builder but surfaced in social, display personalized assortments and affiliate tracking.

In this model, the independent online store becomes one node in a network of commerce surfaces. For some merchants, especially those targeting Gen Z, the “storefront” is effectively a TikTok profile and a WhatsApp thread, with the website serving as a more traditional reference and support destination. Firework+2Disrupt

Measuring Influence and Attributing Sales in a Blended World

As commerce fragments across feeds and chats, attribution becomes one of the thorniest challenges. Builder apps are under pressure to provide multi-touch measurement that captures the impact of live events, creator content, and conversational assistance.

Analytics dashboards in 2026 builder apps track metrics such as:

Revenue from live shopping sessions versus evergreen video.
Conversion rates for orders initiated via chat or social DMs.
Lift in average order value when an AI agent participates in a session.

These insights drive optimization: merchants can adjust which SKUs are highlighted in live streams, tweak the scripts used by conversational agents, or rebalance spend between paid social ads and organic community-building.

At the same time, privacy constraints and platform policies limit access to granular data. Builder apps respond by emphasizing first-party data strategies, encouraging merchants to capture opt-in contact information and preference data during social and conversational interactions that can be re-used across campaigns. Sprout Social

Closing Thoughts and Looking Forward

By 2026, eCom builder apps that still think in terms of “website plus social integrations” will feel dated. The center of gravity has moved into feeds and chats, where attention, trust, and recommendations already live.

The winners will be platforms that treat social and conversational commerce as first-class citizens: making it easy to design shoppable content, orchestrate AI-powered conversations, and measure performance across a web of touchpoints. For merchants, this shift demands new skills in storytelling, community-building, and conversational design, but the payoff is deeper engagement and more resilient, creator-powered growth.

As regulations and platform policies evolve, builder apps will also need to navigate data access, algorithmic transparency, and content moderation challenges. The long-term opportunity lies in harmonizing these powerful but fragmented surfaces into a coherent, customer-centric experience that feels natural wherever the shopper happens to be scrolling or chatting.

References
What Is Social Commerce? Stats and Tips to Know in 2025, Sprout Social, https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-commerce/ Sprout Social
TikTok Is Driving U.S. Social Commerce Growth, Insider Intelligence / eMarketer, https://www.emarketer.com/content/tiktok-driving-us-social-commerce-growth EMARKETER
The Social Commerce Surge, Exploding Topics, https://explodingtopics.com/blog/social-commerce Exploding Topics
Ecommerce Chatbots: Use Cases and Benefits Explained, Bloomreach, https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/e-commerce-chatbots-use-cases-benefits-explained Bloomreach
Boost Sales with Conversational AI in eCommerce: 2025 Guide, eDesk, https://www.edesk.com/blog/conversational-ai-in-ecommerce/ eDesk

Author and Co-Editor:
Claire Gauthier, Author – eCommerce Technologies, Montreal, Quebec;
Peter Jonathan Wilcheck, Co-Editor, Miami, Florida.

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