The Social Connector

Introducing The Social Connector

True social commerce means consumers purchasing, in-app, on-platform, without clicking through to an external shopping cart. The Social Connector is a platform-agnostic proprietary SaaS application designed by VML that enables this, connecting the back-end of a brand’s commerce stack to social native checkout, enabling a frictionless checkout process. Even if you’re operating a large, complex tech stack, it makes purchasing on social channels seamless, supporting the checkout flow journey which includes:

→ Order placement and acknowledgement

→ Order shipment, including part and multi-shipment

→ Order cancellations, including part cancellation

→ Returns (single or multiple)

→ Refunds

How does it work?

The Social Connector acts as a bridge between the social native checkout and a brand’s commerce technology stack, modifying the data structure of the order from the social channel into your target platform – be that an eCommerce platform, OMS or something custom-built. The diagram presents an overview of the architecture.

Here's how it works in practice:

A customer clicks a product to buy on the social platform. The Social Connector pulls the order into your eCommerce platform, OMS or whatever custom set up you run.
As it transfers the order, The Social Connector modifies the data structure from the social channel so the commerce platform can process it.
With the client configuration within The Social Connector, the application understands who the order is for and where it should go.
The order is submitted in the commerce platform for the order shipment process to start.
There are subsequent interactions such as passing order status updates between the platforms.

Part of our Commerce Intelligence platform, The Social Connector forms the technology capability in our Social Commerce service, which has been developed to enable an end-to-end social commerce experience, covering all you need to nail your social presence. For more information click here.