Why UK businesses are betting on social commerce and AI for growth

Nearly half of UK businesses now rank social media as their most important sales and marketing channel, above owned websites, email, and paid search. If you run a WooCommerce store and your entire commercial operation still points inward to your own site, that figure should prompt a serious question about where your customers are actually making buying decisions — and whether your setup supports that.

The same research, drawn from the Amex European Business Barometer polling 500 senior decision-makers at consumer-facing UK companies, shows 65% expect growth over the next 12 months despite competitive and operational pressures. That confidence points in a specific direction: 76% of UK businesses are already investing in new approaches to meet evolving customer expectations, and the businesses planning to grow are reconfiguring how they sell rather than waiting for conditions to improve.

For WooCommerce operators, this creates a specific gap. Your store may be technically sound, correctly configured, and well-maintained, yet still structured around a buying journey that fewer customers are actually taking. The question is whether your WooCommerce catalogue is connected to the channels where purchase decisions now happen, or whether it is sitting in isolation, waiting for traffic that is increasingly going elsewhere.

Social Commerce Means Your WooCommerce Catalogue Needs to Leave Your Site

Social commerce means making products purchasable within the social platform itself, or making the path from discovery to checkout short enough that the customer does not abandon it. That requires your product data to be structured and syndicated correctly at the WooCommerce end before any social channel can consume it. Running ads on Instagram is a different thing entirely.

The Facebook for WooCommerce plugin (now Meta for WooCommerce) handles catalogue sync between your store and Meta’s commerce surfaces, including Instagram Shopping and Facebook Shops. The quality of that sync depends entirely on what is in your product data. If your WooCommerce products are missing GTIN fields, have inconsistent category mapping, or carry product descriptions written purely for SEO rather than social discovery, the catalogue Meta receives will be degraded — products get rejected, feeds fail validation, and your items either do not appear or appear without buy buttons. The technical configuration on your site determines whether social commerce works at all, not the platform settings on Meta’s side.

TikTok Shop integration follows the same principle. WooCommerce’s TikTok extension pushes your catalogue to TikTok’s shopping surface, but product data quality and category compliance are prerequisites, and getting the WooCommerce side right is the unglamorous groundwork that determines whether the social channel performs.

AI Adoption Is Running Ahead of the Infrastructure Needed to Support It

92% of UK businesses are already using AI or plan to within two years, with improving data and analytics and enhancing customer service topping the list of planned applications. A further 69% believe early adoption of Agentic AI will provide a competitive edge, and 71% of UK firms believe long-term success will come from combining AI with human insight to win customer trust.

Those are intentions. The gap between intention and execution sits in the data infrastructure underneath, because AI-driven personalisation, product recommendations, and customer service tools all depend on clean, structured, accessible data from your store. WooCommerce stores that have accumulated years of inconsistent product data, patched-together order workflows, and plugin conflicts produce data that AI tools cannot use reliably: a recommendation engine fed bad product taxonomy returns irrelevant suggestions, and a customer service AI working from incomplete order history gives wrong answers.

The configuration work involved is not glamorous. It means cleaning product attribute data, ensuring order metadata is structured consistently, and confirming that your analytics setup — whether Google Analytics 4 via the WooCommerce GA4 integration or a dedicated tool like Metorik — is capturing the right events. Without that groundwork, AI sits on top of noise rather than signal.

Payments are the third area the research flags. WooCommerce’s payments configuration — which gateways are active, whether express checkout options like Apple Pay and Google Pay are enabled through WooCommerce Payments or Stripe, and how the checkout flow handles returning customers — directly affects conversion at the moment of purchase. Social commerce in particular tends to attract mobile-first buyers with low tolerance for friction, and a checkout that requires account creation or manual card entry loses those customers before the transaction completes.

All of the configuration decisions that determine whether a customer completes a purchase are made in WooCommerce settings, not on the social platform. One consequence that rarely gets attention: if your competitors are connecting their catalogues to social platforms and yours is not, they are appearing in purchase-intent moments where you are absent. The businesses planning growth over the next 12 months are making those configuration decisions now, and the window to move early is measured in months, not years.

If you want to know whether your WooCommerce store is configured to support social commerce, AI-driven tools, and payment conversion at the standard the market now expects, I offer a focused technical audit through The WordPress Guy. The audit covers catalogue data quality, social channel integration readiness, and checkout configuration — the three areas the research identifies as the growth priorities for the next 12 months. Given that 65% of UK businesses are targeting growth right now, the cost of an unaudited store is measured in the sales going to competitors whose configuration is already in place. Book the audit here.