The evolution of Community Commerce
Let’s talk about the evolution of community commerce from an individual reseller perspective. Here we are talking about individuals who wish to earn side income (they have some other form of main income) by selling products they don’t make or even own.
Traditional Reseller programs
For many of us we grew up reselling products at a young age. In the US, it often starts in school selling magazine subscriptions or Girl Scout Cookies.
Before the internet, if you wanted to earn side income you could become a promoter and pass out flyers, signup to be an agent, or any other number of opportunities.
These programs continue to flourish globally, most often provided by large companies or MLM networks
In these pre internet communities, we saw the ability for individuals to sell just about anything using printed mail order catalogs and hosted events. Our parents and teachers helped us find our first customers, and later we turned to our friends and colleagues once all family members had been approached.
One thing in common shared by these traditional reseller programs, that continues to the present, is how often resellers work together.
If you ever needed help on what products to buy, or how to market a product all you had to do was ask another seller.
Let’s look at how reseller programs changed once people started going online and having their own sites.
The rise of affiliate networks, blogs and marketplaces created the first DIY homepreneur in the 90s and early 2000s
Platforms like GeoCities, Xanga, and later Ebay emerged as leading players in reselling products and services using links. For the first time, you could get paid for telling your audience to buy something you were promoting online.
In the pre influencer days of the web, people quickly discovered how to make clickbait articles and other content for the sole purpose of driving external clicks for commission.
While the platforms have changed throughout the years, affiliate networks continue to be used in developed Western Markets. Sometimes these networks go by new names like Native Advertising, but in essence getting commission for converting traffic from your website to a third party external site conversion is almost 20 years old already !
For the rest of the world, that skipped out on Web and went straight to mobile, they have instead flocked to reselling on Social Media.
Social Commerce has helped influencers and companies reach new customers
Social Commerce is a sales channel dominated by companies that leverage social networks to market their products and services, and influencers who have substantial following or financial backing, with everyone else fighting for scraps.
While it may seem an ideal channel to promote community based selling on the surface, the effect of having so many people all trying to sell to one another in the same channel is actually highly competitive and individualized.
To illustrate, let’s revisit the tupperware sales process and convert the sales process of traditional hosted parties to selling on social media.
The first thing you’ll need to do online, is to acquire your products. Whereas in the traditional model, other sellers would provide you with supply (or the company making the product), now you have to do it on your own.
You might first want to consider joining a network or acquiring the products form a wholesale site like Aliexpress. These sites have tremendous amount of products and supporting services, but for someone new it could be quite intimidating. Still, for the seller willing to adventure on their own, it’s a good starting point before tackling the logistics of getting those products to your customers.
Speaking of logistics, don’t worry about storing the products, now you can work directly with manufactures who will ship to your customers on your behalf on demand (dropship). Of course, you might not find what you want there or don’t want to pay fees to join a third party dropship network, so make sure in that case to have enough free space in your closet for all that tupperware.
So you have your inventory and logistics sorted, but how are you going to sell? Good news you can now sign up for Shopify or any of its competitors and start selling in the same day for the cost of a monthly subscription.
If that is too expensive or daunting, you can join many sellers on Facebook and Instagram that engage in what is called ‘Pre-Sales’. In that process, you post the products and get interest and sometimes even upfront payment, before you then place your orders to acquire the products. This model is good for limiting risk, but then requires tremendous amount of back and forth.
Of course payment is a nightmare assuming you didn’t invest in your own store, because now you need to physically meet your buyer or do a direct transfer that isn’t backed by any 3rd party to arbitrage the transaction.
Next, after that investment and time spent to get just the right tupperware ready to be sold, you might need to consider which social network to focus on.
Are your friends more likely to buy from you on Instagram or Facebook? What about groups? Are you an active member in any whatsapp groups? Each social network has its own niche in terms of how to sell and promote your products, and also now with many having their own marketplace, you need to potentially duplicate your postings.
In regards to marketing, an increasing trend are for sellers to implement live streams where sellers will create their personal home shopping channel. These streams are not organized in any manner or grouped so where to position your stream becomes a challenge.
For instance If you are selling tupperware, do you try to find a lifestyle or home related group, or stick to generic buy/sell groups? While there is no right or wrong answer, the real problem is that you are on your own to experiment and figure out on your own.
Now at the same time, other sellers of tupperware might appear, even those claiming to have exclusive tupperware because they are part of a network, or perhaps tupperware brands themselves.
So what are you going to do when you are on your own, now competing with 1000s of other sellers of similar or even the same tupperware?
In the traditional programs, the resellers didn’t need to worry about competition, they sold with friends in each others houses closed off to the rest of the world who didn’t have an invite.
Traditional resellers didn’t need to understand how to install a plugin or do a data sync between a third party dropship network (oberlo) and integrate with your ecommerce platform (shopify). I’m pretty sure my Mom wouldn’t even attempt to understand what that means, but give her a catalog and some tupperware and she could be dangerous.
Finally, traditional resellers had the ability to ask each other for help, and to learn from one another. In a Facebook group or marketplace, the only thing sellers will answer is when someone leaves them a request for a DM to buy. Somehow the real world space is more welcoming than online even on social media where users are known.
Social Commerce diverges from traditional seller programs
Social Commerce is not the same as modernizing traditional reseller programs for todays resellers. Social Commerce is a marketing channel to sell products you own or don’t own. It’s no different than selling on a marketplace like Amazon, or posting a flyer at your supermarket bulletin board for piano lessons.
Community Commerce differs in that its goal is to provide a new framework for sellers to work together in a group setting, working to modernize traditional forms of selling.
The goal of social commerce is to reach as many people as possible to sell your products or services with the least amount of effort.
While you may be part of a ‘Group’ in actuality you are part of a mini classified site (a mini craigslist) where people all share their own tupperware, or even worse completely random things that offend you.
If you were to ask any of the members in your group for help in selling, you may get someone like the admin to help out of charity, but could you really count on them to help you with customer support, warehouse issues or which products to feature during the new year holidays?
Social Commerce therefore is a channel. A good channel but not really the same as resellers traditional hosted tupperware parties after all.
Social networks are simply not designed for community based sales. Facebook in particular and with various trials and errors on Instagram have created a marketplace, which works like classifieds for selling your own stuff, but less great when selling other peoples stuff.
Therefore, Social Commerce we can say has taken a divergent path from traditional reseller programs, and can be best thought as evolving from printed classifieds as opposed to hosted tupperware parties.
Community Commerce is something that was made possible recently
Before the advent of mobile apps, it was extremely difficult to signup a diverse pool of resellers who don’t own computers or even wifi at home.
For mobile only resellers(the majority in emerging markets and therefore the world), a data light approach that is simple and as easy as a chat app or social network has only been possible in the past few years thanks to lower phone and data costs and increase in rural mobile network coverage.
With the rise of ecommerce globally, has come last mile delivery, E Wallets, and APIs for chat, support and everything one would need to coordinate community commerce programs for all types of resellers.
Therefore, as Ecommerce has evolved to a marketplace model, both B2B and C2C, it makes sense that traditional and web based types of reseller programs now look to be mobile centric in how they go about acquiring sellers.
Community Commerce is global and paving the way for more and more sellers to start earning side income
From Nigeria to China, and the US to Indonesia, you will find groups of sellers working together to resell products for side income.
With new advances in mobile technology and mobile centric communities, community commerce has the opportunity to provide to help millions of people earn side income.
Now that we’ve explained a little bit of how we got here, we’ll next talk about some of the key features of a Community Commerce Program.
