In the age of AI-generated content and fake reviews, trust can be a hard thing for marketers to earn. That reality is giving rise to a relatively new initiative producing great early results for some of our eCommerce clients: community commerce.

In this post, I’ll explain what community commerce is, how it works, the partners involved, and the kinds of brands getting strong performance from community commerce campaigns.

What is community commerce?

Community commerce campaigns help people connect with their friends and family to share product recommendations for purchase. Immediately, you can understand the appeal – who else would you trust more than friends and family?

Essentially, people use community commerce platforms to share either wishlists or simple recommendations with family and friends – sometimes featuring product discounts but often sharing full-priced items, with the appeal coming from a trusted person’s confidence in recommending the product. In a world full of consumer skepticism, community commerce helps cut through the noise.

How does community commerce work?

Let’s say I have a great sweater I want to recommend, and I’d like to send you a link so you can check it out. You click from your phone and purchase, then the partner I used to send you that link gets a commission from that sale.

Community commerce partners all offer the user building their lists some kind of valuable utility: organization, shopping lists saved across stories (almost like Pinterest), user profiles you can share. It’s very much a blend of shopping and social media, and for brands, it generally works on a commission basis. There are set-ups where brands can pay for media and not commissions, but we tend to go the commission route to keep our clients’ budget on revenue generation. The only stipulation is to make sure the fees fit within the brand’s margin structure.

Who are the key community commerce partners?

Community commerce is very much in its early stages. Right now, there’s only one partner – Locker – driving meaningful performance for our brands, but we’ve seen similar companies, including Garde-Robe and Stow, launch their own sites within the last several months.

Each of these partners has a slightly different set of features, but the idea – enabling easy sharing of product recommendations for a commission – is basically the same. We’re betting at DMi that the concept has legs and will be part of the next trust-based evolution of digital commerce.

“We’re seeing the rise in AI-powered search and curator-driven recommendations as a sign that consumers desire a simplified and pre-vetted product discovery experience. For brands, this means when building product pages or considering affiliate optimization opportunities, they need to prioritize social validation and peer-approved legitimacy,” said Mary Grace Scully, Locker’s Head of Marketing. “At Locker, every single product on the platform has to have been saved by a shopper. By tying a username and profile to every product, we help brands not only understand social context but also add a layer of trust to their products for prospective consumers.”

What kinds of brands should test community commerce?

While it’s important to note that there’s not a ton of community commerce scale (yet), any brand looking to expand their partner network and promotional methods can and should test it.

The “requirements,” if you can call them that, are that the brand has products that are particularly good fits for recommendations (e.g. clothing, fashion, makeup), has an online presence, and has relatively strong brand awareness that helps substantiate the trust factor. And, as mentioned, the commission fees in play have to work within the brand’s margin structure.

Interested in testing community commerce?

We’re working with a bunch of our clients right now to dip a toe in community commerce, as much to get familiar with its levers as to bring in a boatload of new revenue. As I said, we see this as an important piece of the evolution of eCommerce and a great counterbalance to the bots and fake reviews that have become more and more prevalent in the digital landscape. If you’re interested in hearing more about community commerce, drop us a line at info@dmipartners.com.