The system behind social commerce success

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When beauty brand P.Louise pulled in £1.5 million during a single 12-hour TikTok Shop livestream, the industry response followed a familiar arc.

The event was heralded a cultural milestone, dissected as a content strategy and chased by brands hoping to replicate its success. We explored P.Louise's approach as part of our latest deep dive Return on Social.

But virality tends to flatten everything into the same amorphous shape. This kind of success isn’t conjured from energy, charisma or even a ready-made audience — though all three certainly help. 

Behind P.Louise’s stream was a CRM engine tuned to conversion. An ecosystem that had been tracking, segmenting and planning for weeks.

“We went back to literally day one,” says Ian Reeves, CEO of CRM agency Flourish. They’re the team behind the backend systems that supported the event. “What are we doing today? Who are the hand raisers? What signals do we already have?”

For all the noise about spontaneity and scrappy success, what drives outcomes in social commerce has more to do with orchestration than content.

Behind the scenes

The usual hallmarks were present in the lead-up to the livestream: teaser posts, warmed-up audiences, discount codes cued to drop on air.

Beneath the surface was a rarer kind of alignment. Reeves calls it a “multi-agency approach,” but that undersells the degree of coordination: CRM, paid media and SEO teams working not just in parallel, but in sync — tracking hand-raisers, adjusting spend and refining segments in real time.

“We’re quite often targeted as a CRM agency on last click,” he notes. “Same with PPC or SEO. But actually, we all need to be targeted on the same thing: how many people turn up who are in buying mode.”

That shared objective shaped everything upstream. Weeks before the event, Flourish was working alongside paid and social teams to flag early signs of intent such as email clicks and site scrolls.

These cues informed how customers were pre-segmented: what ads they saw, and how much was spent to get them there. 

"By working with the PPC agency, we can demonstrate a better return on ad spend because we're already segmenting that data," Reeves told us. "We're narrowing that down, reducing spend and increasing the possibility of someone registering."

This kind of groundwork isn’t especially glamorous, but it demonstrates that livestreams are less about real-time responsiveness than readiness. 

The data is put to work before the campaign launches — so that when the moment lands, there’s a system ready to catch the momentum. 

For most brands, that level of alignment never quite materialises. Livestreams get treated as the main event, when really they’re the output. 

And in the absence of integration, teams default to parallel play: data is scattered, objectives don’t match and teams chase their own metrics while the customer journey dissolves between them.

The result isn’t failure, just waste: of attention, of budget and of the moment’s full commercial value.

The data engine underneath

While audiences watched giveaways and live commentary play out in real time, Flourish was tracking something else entirely: a steady accumulation of behavioural signals designed to fuel long-term decisions.

More significant than a sales event, the livestream presented a chance to model the future customer. 

“If someone’s clicking on something from Facebook and making a purchase, you’ve got basic information,” Reeves explains. “What we then look at is taking somebody on a data journey. What data do we need over time to understand what type of customer they’re going to be?”

It’s a question Flourish has answered before, albeit in more corporate contexts, for global brands like Unilever. For one B2B client, Reeves told us how his team built segmentation models based on business size, profit margins and menu complexity, to forecast annual spend and design personalised journeys accordingly.

The logic is the same here, scaled to suit a younger, zippier consumer base. What starts as a one-click impulse is treated as the first node in a longer chain of insight.

Every action around the livestream — what was browsed, ignored, added to cart, left behind — was folded into a broader model. Not solely to personalise follow-up comms, but to understand what kind of customer P.Louise was cultivating. What they might want next, what price points made them convert. What gaps in the product line could be inferred from both hesitations and purchases. 

“It’s a privilege to be invited into someone’s inbox,” says Reeves. “We want people to click — but also not to click. Both tell us something.”

Taken together, those patterns not only inform the next campaign: they start to shape the business. Purchase data becomes bundling logic. Repeated signals sharpen inventory planning. Instead of guessing at demand, brands begin to pre-empt it through cumulative design.

The preparation machine

In theory, going live is the final step. In practice, it’s the output of weeks of invisible prep — arriving at the right moment, with the right systems already in motion. 

For Flourish, that meant working backwards.

“What do we need in order to get there, and what are our goals? That takes us back to literally day one,” says Reeves. “We’re identifying people who are already customers that could be hand raisers. We’re looking at customer segmentation as day one.”

Reeves calls the process “back casting.” The premise is simpler than it sounds. Most brands plan forward from the livestream: content, talent, promotion. Flourish planned backward from the conversion moment. Who’s most likely to show up? Who needs warming? What happens when they don’t?

Those questions address scenarios most brands never consider. What happens to the people who register but don’t attend? Or attend but don’t buy? What does a successful purchase trigger in the backend — and how does that change someone’s expected buying cycle? 

Reeves is clear: “All of these questions need to be answered beforehand. Understanding what content we’re going to serve afterwards — it has to be done.”

There’s a pragmatic streak to the planning that rarely enters the social commerce conversation. Fulfilment gets less airtime than follower count, but it’s where credibility is built. 

“There’s going to be a load of orders here,” Reeves points out. “Are we able to get all these orders out on time? We’ve got to get all those out in 24 hours.”

Even reputation management needs pre-planning. A livestream is public by design, and thus volatile: not every interaction ends happily. “There’s going to be some people who are unhappy as well in the process,” he acknowledges. “This is a massive PR moment, and the PR side of things needs looking at as well.”

It’s not that most brands fail to plan. It’s that they plan for the front end, and that’s the part people can see. Content gets a run sheet, talent gets briefed, but the backend systems that make social shoppable — and keep customers in orbit afterwards — often remain unbuilt.

The scale reality

It’s tempting to hold up P.Louise as a template. But scale brings its own physics, and what plays out cleanly at startup pace tends to warp under enterprise weight.

For bigger brands, the question isn’t whether the results are enviable — they are — but whether they’re replicable. Reeves is careful not to overstate the point.

“P.Louise primarily targets Gen Alpha,” he notes. “They’re social natives and understand that world. P.Louise is already operating in that world, whereas a lot of other brands are aspiring to be in it.” The distinction matters. It’s easier to sell through social when your audience lives there natively.

That built-in fluency gives smaller brands a kind of unfair advantage in cultural proximity. Legacy brands, by contrast, tend to enter the space with more caution. 

Global brands approach social commerce "more cautiously," treating it as a channel that leads to other experiences rather than a complete sales environment. 

For a car retailer, social commerce might drive showroom visits. For established beauty brands, it might support existing retail relationships rather than replacing them.

"I think it's going to take a decent percentage share away from the retail model that we're used to now," Reeves predicts. "I don't think it'll quite get there to be the number one channel. It's a complementary channel rather than something that will completely take over."

This doesn't diminish the opportunity. It requires brands to build infrastructure that works with existing channels, rather than operating in isolation.

Building the foundation

For marketers inspired by P.Louise's numbers, Reeves' advice is decidedly unsexy: focus on infrastructure before innovation.

"The barrier of entry is lower now more than ever," he notes, pointing to accessible CRM platforms like Klaviyo and Bravo, which can link social signals to customer data within a matter of weeks. “But you still need to IP warm. It’s not instant.”

The advantage, in other words, isn’t in the tools. It’s in how you use them — and when. 

Success depends less on spontaneity than on the systems built to catch it. Signals need somewhere to go. Data journeys need somewhere to start. And teams need shared definitions of what they’re trying to achieve.

That requires a level of discipline that doesn’t always come naturally in social. It means looking beyond the dopamine of engagement and towards something more subtle: a click, a return visit, a sale six weeks later that began with a swipe.

Hand raises, not hype.

P.Louise's £1.5 million day grabbed headlines, but everything around it — the segmentation, the orchestration, the intent signals stitched into email and ad journeys — were what held it in place. That’s how you turn a moment into momentum: not by earning attention, but by building the systems to absorb it.

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.