U.S. E-commerce on Brink of a New Social Future

The future of shopping in the U.S. is likely to be a much more compounded and seamless experience between scrolling social media and buying products. Online shopping habits in China, where e-commerce is already being successfully marketed to a young demographic as a built-in component of online entertainment, are predictors of the kind of consumer behaviors that U.S. retailers will start trying to cultivate here in the near future, retail insiders said at a joint presentation on Wednesday by Alibaba and research firm Insider Intelligence.