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Simple social commerce for microenterprises: Initial investigations of a global phenomenon
With the rapid development of E-Commerce platform in the last several years, Micro Enterprises have opportunities to develop its business in the better effective and efficient ways. As Micro Enterprises, in general, have limited resources, adopting, selecting and using the E-Commerce Platform should be conducted carefully. As very few research had been found in this topic, a literature review by using proxies, Small Medium Enterprise for Micro Enterprise and digital technology/services for E-Commerce Platform, had been conducted on the past research with an aim to develop agenda for future research. Review of past research found that research on Micro Enterprise adoption, selection, and usage of digital technology/services, had not given sufficient attention to the latest IT/IS technology/services; the research papers in general, consider the importance of geographical location and use of multi-discipline theories; overall, the research papers covered various stages in digital technology/services adoption. Findings from past research review then used as the basis for future research agenda development.
ocial commerce is doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, by using social media, through an enterprise interactive interface that enables social interactions. Technologies such as Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enable social commerce. Yet, a framework for social commerce, putting Enterprise Social Interactions as central entities, would provide a strong business justification for social commerce design and adoption with these enabling technologies. This work first proposes a framework for social commerce-oriented business that captures: (a) three main entities: Enterprise social Interactions, Actors, and Business Processes (and their output: products/services), (b) the relationships between these entities, and (c) the constraints (if any). Then, it focuses on the conceptualization of the key entity, Enterprise Social Interactions, to shape the required enterprise interface that promotes openness, collaboration and participation, which enables the required knowledge emergence and intelligence for the value (co-)creation. A central component of the enterprise technology architecture, we refer to as Enterprise Social Interaction Manager (ESIM) realizes the interface. An example shows how the realization of the ESIM functionalities with Web 2.0, Cloud computing, and SOA enables the different categories of collaborative B2B integration that underlines and backs social commerce.
Purpose
Social relationships on the internet through the emergence of Web 2.0 applications created new opportunities for business. This is mainly because of the growth of social networking sites, which has also developed e‐commerce. The current development in e‐commerce opened a new stream, entitled social commerce, which is using social technologies to create an environment for generating social interactions. These social interactions can drive online social support in e‐commerce, which in turn is creating trust and an increased intention to use social commerce.
Design/methodology/approach
This research used social support theory and related theories on intention to use to propose a theoretical framework for the adoption of social commerce.
Findings
The model predicts that forums and communities, ratings, reviews, referrals and recommendations are helping to introduce new business plans for e‐vendors. The model also shows trust is an on‐going issue in e‐commerce and can be built through social commerce constructs.
Research limitations/implications
There is limited research in the area of social commerce which this study seeks to redress. This study proposes a new model which can be extended by other constructs. However, the research needs to empirically test the constructs of the proposed model and their relationship.
Originality/value
This paper introduces social commerce constructs, namely; recommendations and referrals, forums and communities and rating and reviews. The bases of the model proposed in this research are IT adoption and literature in the area such as PU and intention to buy or trust. These highlight the key role of ICT in the behaviour of online customers. This can be a development for e‐commerce adoption models and the results signify that IS has a reference discipline for the behaviour of online consumers. This is an issue in marketing where not enough attention is paid to the importance of IT and IS.
Social commerce has quickly emerged as a new area of inquiry for both practitioners and researchers, suggesting the potential impacts of social media and social networking technologies and services in shaping commercial channels on and off the Internet. This essay starts by providing a brief overview of social commerce research and practice in light of the wide attention it has drawn in the industry. Then, we propose a research framework with an integrated view of social commerce that consists of four key components: business, technology, people, and information. The framework helps us understand the development of social commerce research and practice to date. Subsequently, we report some preliminary findings from a bibliometric study of academic and industry publications in social commerce to reveal recent trends and research topics, as well as some verification of the research framework. Finally, we discuss five articles in this special issue and categorize them in terms of the proposed social commerce research framework.
Social commerce is a form of commerce mediated by social media and is converging both online and offline environments. As a relatively new phenomenon, social commerce has evolved quickly in practice, yet has gained little attention in the IS discipline. With its pervasiveness in businesses and people's lives, social commerce presents ample research opportunities that can have both theoretical and practical significance and implications. This article aims to capture researchers' attention by describing the characteristics of social commerce and its potential future directions. We trace the evolutionary patterns of social commerce chronologically, based on trade articles and academic publications from 2005 to 2011. A framework that combines people, management, technology, and information dimensions is used to provide a systematic analysis of social commerce development. Our examination shows that since 2005, the year the term social commerce was incepted, assumptions and understanding of people in social commerce move from a simple and general description of human social nature to a rich exploration with different angles from social psychology, social heuristics, national culture, and economic situations. On the management dimension, business strategies and models evolve from the short-tail to long-tail thinking, with invented concepts such as branded social networks/communities, niche social networks/communities, niche brands, co-creating, team-buying, and multichannel social networks. Technologically, IT platforms and capabilities for social commerce evolve from blogs, to social networking sites, to media-sharing sites, and to smartphones. While Facebook becomes a profit-generating platform, creating the notion of f-commerce, Google and Twitter become strong competitors with great potentials. Information in social commerce evolves from peer-generated, to community-generated (crowdsourcing), to consumer and marketer co-created, and to global crowdsourced. Our examination identifies various conceptualizations, terminologies, views, and perspectives about social commerce and its relation to other well-known concepts such as e-commerce. In light of the evolution of social commerce, we provide possible future directions for research and practice.
The increasing popularity of social networking is providing new opportunities for businesses in electronic commerce. It is evolving in order to adopt Web 2.0 capabilities to support online customer interactions and achieve greater economic value. This trend is referred to as social commerce. This study offers the result of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to explain the concept of social commerce. In order to elaborate this article, 64 papers were considered from the main digital libraries that index computer science conferences and journals. Applying a systematic analysis to these papers, it was possible to summarize the existing evidence concerning the social commerce and outline some open challenges.
The emergence of social media has demonstrated the empowerment of end-users with a transfer of power from sellers to buyers. Consumers have become able to generate content and share this in their networks with peers. Digital content generated by individuals has an economic value. Economic implications in the form of product sales through social interaction of individuals must now be taken into account by businesses. This has seen the emergence of social commerce, an important evolution in e-commerce. This paper draws on social support theory, social commerce constructs and information systems concepts, and proposes a conceptual model. This proposed model investigates the role of social media in facilitating online communication between consumers through social commerce constructs, leading to online social support. A survey has been conducted to examine the structural model. Data analysis using SEM-PLS reveals important factors indicating the role of social media in facilitating online communication through social commerce constructs, generating online social support and affecting consumers' behaviour, the value of social commerce for the market. Theoretical implications and practical implications of this study are explained in the end of the paper.
The development of social media applications has given rise to a new e-commerce paradigm called social commerce. The social features inherent to these applications foster user interaction and contribution which facilitate the online buying and selling of products and services. But businesses face challenges in making their websites socially rich by implementing the features that address their customers' needs. Moreover, social commerce can be achieved in two ways: one brings e-commerce to social media platforms; the other brings social media to e-commerce websites. Faced with such choice, businesses need to understand their customers' preferences with regard to online social and commercial activities. To this end, we investigated user preferences of the social features implemented on current social commerce websites. Using a survey, we identified important features such as providing the “comment” button, encouraging users to respond to comments made by others, and providing product reviews. In addition to the practical implications consisting of insights for the design of social commerce, we found that, in presence of social and commercial features, users visit social networks mainly to socialize, and visit e-commerce websites mainly to shop.
E-commerce is undergoing an evolution through the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities to enhance customer participation and achieve greater economic value. This new phenomenon is commonly referred to as social commerce, however it has not yet been fully understood. In addition to the lack of a stable and agreed-upon definition, there is little research on social commerce and no significant research dedicated to the design of social commerce platforms. This study offers literature review to explain the concept of social commerce, tracks its nascent state-of-the-art, and discusses relevant design features as they relate to e-commerce and Web 2.0. We propose a new model and a set of principles for guiding social commerce design. We also apply the model and guidelines to two leading social commerce platforms, Amazon and Starbucks on Facebook. The findings indicate that, for any social commerce website, it is critical to achieve a minimum set of social commerce design features. These design features must cover all the layers of the proposed model, including the individual, conversation, community and commerce levels.
Social commerce is a form of commerce mediated by social media and social network services (SNS). As a multifaceted phenomenon, social commerce can be studied from different angles and analyzed through the lens of various disciplines. This article examines website technical features to depict the transformation of e-commerce into social commerce. We first develop a conceptual framework to capture three emphases of e-commerce: transactional, relational and social. Then, we use the framework to conduct an historical analysis of the actual website screen captures for five top e-commerce companies since their websites were established. We were able to identify and classify a total of 174 emerging technical features. Our results show that: (1) all three emphases were expressed in the websites and have been reshaping their business and marketing strategies over the years; (2) there was a clear blooming of social features in 2007; and (3) there has been a significant effort to strengthen customer and merchant ties through relational features. Our findings signal that there still is room for further exploration of the social emphasis.
Information technology has created an innovative way in which people communicate and interact. Particularly, social networking websites have become a popular virtual meeting place for consumers to converge and share information. Social networks allow consumers to voluntarily post personal information, upload photographs, send and receive messages, join groups, and blog at their leisure. Consumers now have the means to communicate their opinions about products and companies to other consumers “like themselves” at a critical point in the sales cycle—the beginning.Retailers have a lot to gain by utilizing and harnessing the power of social networking to enhance their overall marketing strategy. Social networking provides the opportunity to learn about their consumers' needs, and then respond proactively and offers creative and effective ways to obtain insights not previously available. Additionally, social networking has moved from the fringes, become more mainstream and started influencing culture. Even though cross-cultural differences may exist and have an impact on the way people use social networking, at the end of the day it is all about being connected to each other and sharing information. It is imperative for retailers to incorporate social networking in their marketing strategy, as in today's business having social networking as a part of the business model is the rule rather than the exception. This conceptual paper puts forth a research model using Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Technology Acceptance Model 3 to examine the cultural influence on social networking and its influence on purchase intention.
Social commerce can be briefly described as commerce activities mediated by social media. In social commerce, people do commerce or intentionally explore commerce opportunities by participating and/or engaging in a collaborative online environment. As a relatively new phenomenon first widely acknowledged in 2005, social commerce presents new opportunities to examine issues related to information/content, business strategies, management, technologies, and people's behavior. This article presents a qualitative longitudinal study which systematically examines technological features and tools in social commerce websites to illustrate their evolution and impacts on the formation of social commerce practice today and its potential future. Using captures crawled by the Wayback Machine, fifteen websites are analyzed from the year they were "born" to the year of 2010. The analyses are guided by a semi-structured checklist of expected and desired tools and features based on a literature review in social commerce. The study finds that social commerce activities appeared as early as the late 90s and that there are different approaches to incorporating social channels and social networks. In addition, the findings support a preliminary classification of social commerce websites, a realignment of the term's conceptualization and the anticipation of possible new directions for this market segment.
The burst of the dot-com balloon closed the era of Web 1.0. In the process, we observed the creation and disappearance of
many small businesses globally. The dynamic and linked web pages provided new pathways to online businesses. However, most
of the new online business models still followed the traditional practices of the industrial era which could be characterized
by closeness, uniformity, and one-way communication. A new set of new technologies, called Web 2.0, offers new opportunities,
blurs the boundaries between online and offline activities, opening a new era with flagships of openness, collaboration, and
participation. In this study, by reviewing the properties of Web 2.0, we investigate opportunities for small businesses in
the Web 2.0 era. The findings of this study can provide helpful guidelines for small businesses to begin using and leveraging
Web 2.0.
As traditional advertising is losing its impact, both advertisers and the media owners who are dependent upon them are desperately seeking alternative ways to reach consumers and alternative ways to earn revenues by doing so. Although there are many ways to earn money from social network traffic, attempting to do so by treating social networks as just another entertainment medium is doomed to failure. Traditional entertainment and advertising media were unidirectional message-sending systems, where paid messages were pushed at viewers as part of the price they paid for being entertained. In contrast, online social networks are better viewed as milieux, or as meeting places where people congregate to exchange information, observe and emulate each other, assess status, and above all entertain themselves. People are not captives, and when they are not interested, are not entertained, or feel that they are being manipulated, they simply leave. The guidelines for monetizing milieux and meeting places are still being discovered.