There remains a tendency to reduce social commerce to a set of tactics—posting content, sharing links or hosting live streams. While those activities are part of the ecosystem, they do not define it. Framing social commerce that way risks treating it as an extension of marketing, when it represents a shift in how the customer journey now takes place.

Each year Stuart Johnson reviews the performance of the publicly traded product-centric direct selling companies. Because these companies report publicly, their results offer one of the clearest windows into the health of the channel.

Last fall, I examined the structural rise of services within direct selling and outlined why recurring value, ownership alignment and scalable platforms were reshaping the channel. The 2025 Services Companies Quick Poll results now show that those structural forces have intensified. The scale is larger. The equity participation is deeper. The demographic reach is broader. The technological investment is more advanced.

While most direct selling and social commerce companies are privately held, the principals behind Social Commerce Partners Acquisition Corp. are looking to help a high-quality, high-performing company within this arena to access the public markets.

Hosted by DSN Founder and CEO Stuart Johnson, the session focused on real-world application rather than theory—what leaders are already building, testing and learning as AI becomes embedded in daily operations.

Our rich history says it will start with leaders willing to take risks. Today, six frontiers stand out. Two involve new strategic approaches while the remaining four are product category opportunities that could fuel growth.

As 2025 draws to a close, the direct selling channel finds itself in a period of meaningful transformation—shaped by rapid technological advancement, shifting consumer expectations, economic pressures and renewed clarity around where future growth will come from.

At DSN's Future of Commerce Deep Dive—held November 19 in Lehi, Utah—we addressed commerce as a whole—the complete ecosystem of technology, payments, finance, taxes, logistics and products working together. Because for commerce to truly thrive, every one of these components must evolve in harmony.

Across the channel, companies that introduce equity initiatives consistently report the same benefits: a more inclusive culture, a deeper sense of contribution, improved field performance, higher retention through vesting, greater continuity of tribal knowledge and a powerful alignment between personal effort and enterprise value.

Social commerce is a new term for a new era. But it is also a powerful signal to the outside world that the way people shop has permanently changed, and direct selling is uniquely positioned to lead—not follow—in this transformation.

Direct Selling University’s (DSU) Fall 2025 event was an electrifying blend of innovation, inspiration and industry connection, welcoming hundreds of leaders from across the channel to explore cutting-edge trends and come together to chart the future of the industry.

Services have become the most consistent source of growth and stability in direct selling, outpacing nearly every other category and now representing more than $30 billion in annual US revenue. This isn’t happening in a vacuum. More than 70 percent of the US economy is services based, and the direct selling channel now mirrors that transformation—60 percent of the channel’s total volume now comes from services rather than products.