E-commerce safety: how brands and platforms can protect children and young shoppers

Almost 7 out of 10 parents agree that more safety measures are required to limit children’s access to online retail and social shopping platforms, according to the WebPurify Kid Commerce Report. But what are the evolving challenges of implementing safety measures, whose responsibility is it, and how hard is it to put policy in place?

The diffusion of e-commerce throughout our online lives adds to the complexity. It’s no longer just about the platforms on which young people are buying products, explains online child safety expert, Vaishnavi J: “It’s the sponsored content or creator content or ads they’re seeing on non-shopping sites like social media platforms, which then leads them to increase their online purchases.”

Vaishnavi J is the founder of Vyanams Strategies (VYS), and formerly the Head of Youth Policy at Meta. She also worked at Twitter and Google on child safety issues across the US and Asia, providing her with a wealth of insight into this vital area. At VYS, her team advises companies, governments and civil society on how to build responsibly for young people. Vaishnavi’s monthly newsletter, Quire, also curates and analyzes the work being done by companies, governments, and civil society to protect children online.

Emerging youth safety trends in e-commerce

Vaishnavi notes three youth safety trends in the current e-commerce landscape:

1. Young shoppers are coming online at a faster pace than any previous generation

Large, established e-commerce platforms are increasingly having to think about how they manage their youth consumers. “So for example, more than half of all teens today in the US say that Amazon is their favorite e-commerce site. That’s not a situation that Amazon has always had to contend with.

“Ulta and Sephora are the most popular beauty destinations for teenage girls and Apple Pay and Venmo are the most popular payment apps. You have these large e-commerce platforms that really have not had to think about the youth experience, suddenly having to think about how to build for young consumers.”

2. It’s about the journey, not just the point of sale

The rise of the youth demographic and the proliferation of UGC online has transformed e-commerce. “When you look at non-product content such as social media links or interactive content like Instagram Reels, TikTok, Pinterest and so on,” suggests Vaishnavi, “they really create this sense of excitement and interest around brands and e-commerce, which then sustains that shopping pattern.

“When we think about e-commerce, it’s tempting to think just about the site where the sale is taking place, but it’s actually connected to the advertising brand influencer space that’s happening off-platform on another site altogether.”

3. A holistic view of brand safety is probably needed

Vaishnavi highlights two ways that brand safety and brand identity are evolving: “First, a company’s brand follows it everywhere, even off of its platform. So the brands that are using their voice to advocate for important causes are getting the largest amount of stickiness with youth consumers or their parents.

“Second, creators are their own brands, and creators don’t have to be loyal to any one platform. It explodes the realm of people and entities you have to be thinking about in relation to youth safety.”

Faced with these challenges, what are the best practices that online platforms and other parties should adopt to manage youth interactions with e-commerce effectively? Vaishnavi offers some food for thought below.

Parental controls for purchases

The last line of defense in protecting young users, and arguably the most impactful, asserts Vaishnavi, is the introduction of parental controls for purchases at the point of sale: “Most large e-commerce platforms now offer that, and it’s incredibly valuable.”

She rightly cautions that parental controls only come into effect at the stage where the user clicks a link to buy a product: “They don’t address the build up that the user was experiencing up to that point, the brand relationships they were building, the loyalties that they were cultivating – and that just means that you have this foundational urge to pursue that through other e-commerce methods.

“One platform may require parental consent, which means you can’t purchase a product through that platform – but another platform might not. So you might just find a way around it because now you have this whole history of building up a relationship.”

Treat e-commerce moderation as a pipeline where all parties play a role

Parents have a pivotal role in moderating their children’s online shopping. But it’s more beneficial to consider safety issues as an ecosystem problem, where brands, social media companies and other ‘non-commerce’ platforms have a part to play, Vaishnavi suggests.

“When we look at e-commerce, we have a number of young people who are shopping online independently, with their parents’ cards and their parents’ full knowledge and consent – because parents can’t possibly be looking at every single purchase that a child is making across all these different apps. It’s time for a really honest conversation about what the bandwidth and willingness of parents is.

“E-commerce is in every part of our society, and it would be reductive to say that only one person can play a role. Companies and platforms have a role to play, but so do governments.

“Some of the most effective things I’ve seen come from industry organizations and initiatives, such as GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media). They’ve established a brand safety floor, and this essentially says, these are the types of content against which we shouldn’t have ads appearing. That’s really valuable guidance for brands, and it’s really valuable guidance for companies looking to make their platforms more brand safe.”

Influencers should be more transparent about monetization

The impact content creators have on the purchasing habits of young people is significant. Our Kid Commerce Report underlines this, with 44% of parents saying their child is easily swayed by social media influencers.

“Creators have their own identity and people follow them across different platforms without a second thought. They really see them as their friends, as someone who looks just like them and is really relatable, and that kind of loyalty is hard to disrupt. That has significant consequences for e-commerce,” says Vaishnavi.

A largely unregulated creator e-commerce industry poses a problem. “If a creator on a social media platform can promote counterfeit products under the tag of ‘dupes’ or ‘replicas’ – both of which are popular terms – and they are able to send their teen viewers directly to a shopping link that the e-commerce platform hasn’t yet detected, then that’s a problem and a hard thing to avoid.”

E-commerce platforms are doing their own proactive monitoring, but the solution requires a lot of cross-sector collaboration “that frankly isn’t there yet,” Vaishnavi adds.

It makes formulating and enforcing youth policies very difficult: “A lot of the policies still focus on the point of sale and the regulations around that. But when it comes to counterfeit products or unsafe products, it’s difficult to follow that trail without a dedicated team that has expertise in youth behaviors to support you.”

There is much work that needs to be done in the creator monetization space, but most tools that creators have at their disposal are voluntary, Vaishnavi says.

“A lot of the incentive for creators to mark content as paid or sponsored actually comes from their audiences whose trust they don’t want to lose. But there is no real way to track if a creator is getting paid in some way to promote something if they don’t disclose it.

“The onus should be on brands to check that the creators that they’re entering into partnerships with have actually disclosed it.”

Laws and regulations need updating for the social marketplace

Vaishnavi anticipates an increased consolidation of the creator economy as the next big problem to grapple with. “What’s interesting is that creators who amass loyalty are going to be able to take it anywhere, including potentially to their own smaller communities – whether that’s setting up their own website or releasing their own videos independent of any platform.

“It’s already challenging when you’re looking at the Amazons, Instagrams and TikToks of this world, but if you’re now looking at a variety of independent consumer brands that are creator-driven, that is going to be really hard to regulate. I’m excited for this as it represents democratization of the space, but it definitely brings its challenges.”

Bills like the UK Children’s Code and the EU’S Digital Services Act (DSA) have introduced a significant amount of protection for children and young people around their privacy online, but “we now need to look at the lifecycle of creators on platforms, the trajectories that they travel in, and then identify the moments where we need better industry guidance or government regulation,” Vaishnavi suggests.

“For example, we need to have more severe cross-platform penalties for platforms or creators that are recommending counterfeit products which can also be dangerous and unsafe since they haven’t been vetted for quality.

“There are existing laws that address counterfeits, there are existing laws that address monetization and brand sponsorship, but they haven’t been updated to reflect the digital reality we’re living in.”

Build trust with young users to reinforce your bottom line

Pursuing profit and investing in the safety of a platform are not mutually exclusive endeavors. “Trust and safety has been a cost center for such a long time,” Vaishnavi points out, “but when it comes to youth safety, it’s really difficult to see it just as a cost center.”

The responsibility of protecting consumers and the pursuit of revenue goals are typically positioned as oppositional forces, she underlines, “But what I think is different with the children’s market is that these two things are incredibly complementary. While teens spend a lot of time online shopping and have an enormous amount of spending power, their parents are a really important part of the equation.

“As soon as parents or children don’t feel safe on a platform, or have even one negative experience, it substantially affects their engagement – especially when money has been exchanged. So I would say that protecting children online is a really important component of commercial success, just like brand safety is a really important part of a company’s success.”