New Digital Age sits down with digital industry veteran Martin Kelly, Founder of Onyx Commerce, to discuss how the social commerce landscape has matured, why big brands are moving in and where the market is heading next.
How do you define social commerce in today’s market, and how is it evolving beyond TikTok?
At its core, social commerce is creator-led commerce. It’s creators selling products and actively influencing the purchasing journey.
While TikTok Shop served as the bedrock of this model, accounting for a significant share of early activity, the ecosystem is rapidly broadening.
Platforms like YouTube are launching dedicated social commerce products, while players like Whatnot, eBay Live, and Amazon are expanding their live commerce capabilities. We’re seeing both geographic expansion into European markets and a demographic maturing as younger, digitally-native shoppers gain increased purchasing power.
What is the fundamental difference between traditional ecommerce and social commerce?
The biggest misconception is treating social commerce like standard ecommerce.
Traditional ecommerce, such as Amazon, is destination and search driven. You log on because you already know you need a specific item.
Social commerce is discovery driven. Users don’t log on intending to buy a specific utensil or electronic gadget; they log on to be entertained and end up inspired to make a purchase.
It’s less about uploading an entire catalog and more about activating key product lines through the right creator strategies.
How has Onyx Commerce grown, and what does the operational side of your agency look like?
We’ve experienced rapid growth, scaling to around 30 staff in the UK and onboarding roughly 15 brands this year alone. Interestingly, we are onboarding brands fresh to this ecosystem rather than just competing for existing accounts.
Operationally, it requires a completely unique setup compared to a traditional digital agency. We now operate three, soon to be four, dedicated live shopping studios.
Managing live stream operations requires skills drawn more from traditional TV production, producers, studio managers, presenters, combined with retail-focused talent handling inventory integration, stock technology, and pricing models.
You’ve described social commerce as a modern form of affiliate marketing. How does that work?
Conceptually, social commerce is affiliate marketing by another name.
Instead of relying solely on a small group of high-profile influencers for top-of-funnel brand awareness, success at scale depends on managing a large pool of smaller creators acting as performance affiliates.
On platforms like TikTok Shop, an agency might brief hundreds of micro-creators who produce transactional content for their own audiences. A key mechanical advantage is how platform algorithms amplify top performers.
If a creator with 1,000 followers generates high-converting content, the platform’s ad engine picks it up and boosts it natively to a much broader audience, making paid spend feel organic rather than forced.
What is the biggest challenge for major brands entering this space?
Brand safety and control. Established enterprise brands spend millions building and protecting their brand identity.
When you enter social commerce, you have to accept a degree of freedom and rawness. Content needs to feel unpolished and authentic to resonate; over-produced corporate assets simply don’t convert.
We recently launched a high-end fashion brand where a significant portion of top-performing affiliate content was generated using AI. Instinctively, both the brand and our team hesitated, but the content drove exceptional sales volume.
If brands try to tightly police every single asset created by hundreds of affiliates, they won’t scale. You have to establish clear guardrails, brief creators properly, and then trust the ecosystem.
How are retail categories and consumer behaviors shifting on these platforms?
We are witnessing a rapid shift in both category maturity and buyer demographics. Two years ago, social commerce was almost entirely driven by low-cost beauty products, fast fashion, and drop-shipped items.
Today, categories like consumer electronics, home appliances, and mother-and-baby products are surging. B
As younger audiences who grew up on social discovery mature into higher-income households, their default buying habits stay with them. Major conglomerates are taking notice, Unilever’s acquisition of Liquid I.V., a brand built natively on social commerce, proves that major enterprise players realise they need a footprint in this channel.
What lies ahead for Onyx Commerce and the wider social commerce industry?
Expansion across both platforms and geographies. The UK remains a mature market within Europe, but regions like Germany, Spain, and Italy are accelerating.
For agencies and brands, the challenge will be organisational clarity, determining whether social commerce sits within ecommerce, D2C, social, or performance media teams.
Ultimately, creator-driven sales and native social checkout tools are setting the direction for how commerce will operate over the next decade. Brands that build the muscle today will be the ones leading tomorrow.
