Social commerce and social advertising are becoming two different disciplines

In-platform checkout features on major social platforms are maturing into a genuinely separate purchase path from the traditional model of advertising to drive traffic to an owned site, with different conversion dynamics, different data visibility, and different customer relationship implications.

A sale completed entirely within a platform's own checkout typically gives the brand less first-party customer data than a sale completed on the brand's own site, which has real implications for retention and lifetime value work downstream.

Brands need to make a deliberate choice about how much revenue to route through in-platform checkout versus owned-site checkout, rather than defaulting to whichever the platform makes easiest, because the trade-off between conversion friction and data ownership is real in both directions.