Why Fashion Should Be Sceptical About Elon Musk’s ‘Super App’

Elon Musk is taking his turn as the latest tech mogul to be taken in by the dream of building a “super app” where users share text, images and video but also do their banking, shopping and more.

The controversial and ongoing rebrand of Twitter to X is directly tied to Musk’s plan to build what he calls “the everything app,” a vision modelled on China’s WeChat, where users might watch videos, pay bills and buy handbags all within the app’s ecosystem. If Musk proves successful, it could create new opportunities for fashion e-commerce.

There’s good reason to be sceptical about his prospects. Western brands and retailers may harbour their own hopes of recreating the social commerce and livestream shopping seen in Asia, where those activities play an outsized role in driving sales. Western consumers, on the other hand, seem less enthusiastic about the concept. That’s because, the argument goes, being accustomed to a fragmented landscape of apps, they can find multi-function apps disorienting and unnecessary. Facebook has accumulated features, for example, including payments, but remains far from being an all-in-one app and couldn’t make live shopping work.

A series of tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg have fantasised about building a super app but none has yet succeeded. Nobody before had Musk’s resources and freedom from oversight, however. As of this writing, he’s the world richest person, and X is now a private company under his control.

He shouldn’t get his hopes up.

“[T]he window for super apps has closed,” Forrester, a technology research and advisory firm, declared in a recent report.

In Forrester’s view, the emergence of super apps like WeChat and Alipay in China, KakaoTalk in South Korea, Line in Japan and Paytm in India wasn’t just a matter of building the right product. It was also about timing. Each one launched to provide users a core service, like messaging or payment, and was the first to do so in its market, allowing them to grow without competition. From there, they quickly expanded into other essential services, including e-commerce, increasing their “stickiness” for users. Next they opened their ecosystems to third-party services that could further augment their uses.

Xiaofeng Wang, principal analyst at Forrester based in Singapore, said in an email that “the conditions for super apps to succeed are absent today, especially in the West.”

As much as tech entrepreneurs wish otherwise, there’s no consumer need for a super app in the US or Europe at this point. There’s more competition for services, too — just think of the number of payment options available, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo and more. And Regulation in the West is much more stringent, especially these days as US antitrust authorities step up their scrutiny of Big Tech.

Companies may continue to successfully bundle some capabilities together, the way buy-now-pay-later firms such as Klarna are introducing apps that bring shopping directly into the BNPL ecosystem. But these apps are more likely to be “super-ish than truly super,” as the authors of a recent piece in Harvard Business Review put it.

Of course, fashion could still see its dream of abundant social commerce and livestream shopping realised without a super app. It would just take getting users to buy on social platforms and during livestream events. But even that has faced obstacles in the US. Instagram introduced livestream shopping in 2021, for example, only to pull the plug less than two years later.

“Our data shows that consumers in the US seldom purchase on social media and are not particularly interested in the livestream format,” Wang wrote.

Forrester found in a recent survey that 24 percent of online adults in the US use social media to make purchases at least weekly. That’s not a trivial amount, but it compares with 64 percent in China’s metro areas. In another survey last year, just 17 percent of online adults in the US wanted brands or companies to use livestreams on social media.

Many experts do expect social commerce to grow in the US. Insider Intelligence estimated in a 2021 forecast that US social-commerce retail sales would rise from about $37 billion that year to nearly $80 billion in 2025. TikTok is widely reported to be readying the launch of a US e-commerce marketplace that would see it selling Chinese-made goods in a bid to compete with apps like Shein and Temu, only with the company’s video capabilities built in. Plenty of fashion companies are still banking on social commerce as well.

Perhaps one or all will succeed. But if they do, it’s not likely to happen within a WeChat-style super app in the US.