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.
