Social Commerce – how social media is changing e-commerce

Abstract

This research is to discover how to identify social commerce, a new trend e-commerce. Since 2005 when yahoo introduced social commerce term the industry witness wide range of different website trying to be social. Some of them embed social elements to e-commerce platforms, others embed e-commerce elements into social media. Startups create new websites that mix ecommerce and social media concepts. Social commerce is a field in its early stage that has no clear agreed definition. Researches in social commerce today will play a big role in shaping its future. Therefore, the industry, online business owners and technology expert can benefit from the scientific data gathered and analyzed by this study. The purpose of this study is to describe and define s-commerce. To aid the development of s-commerce websites and mobile applications for B2C business. The result will help business owners, web developers and website administrators in designing this new kind of e-commerce. We achieve this by conducting an online survey to consult developers and software engineers. Moreover, we examine two selfclaimed websites- Wanelo and Polyvore- as case studies. It becomes clear to us that social commerce from scratch is very successful. Wanelo and Polyvore have millions of users and the community posts all products in both websites. Survey results support our hypothesis and match case studies outcome. Participants select features and we gather features from Wanelo and Polyvore. Extracting the common features answers the second research question. Finally, we answer the first question by giving a new definition for social commerce. In addition, we highlighted limitation and guide future researchers to interesting area to cover.