Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services. More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions from browsing to checkout, without ever leaving a social media platform. The term social commerce was introduced by Yahoo! in November 2005 which describes a set of online collaborative shopping tools such as shared pick lists, user ratings and other user-generated content-sharing of online product information and advice. The concept of social commerce was developed by David Beisel to denote user-generated advertorial content on e-commerce sites, and by Steve Rubel to include collaborative e-commerce tools that enable shoppers "to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them". The social networks that spread this advice have been found to increase the customer's trust in one retailer over another. Social commerce aims to assist companies in achieving the following purposes. Firstly, social commerce helps companies engage customers with their brands according to the customers' social behaviors. Secondly, it provides an incentive for customers to return to their website. Thirdly, it provides customers with a platform to talk about their brand on their website. Fourthly, it provides all the information customers need to research, compare, and ultimately choose you over your competitor, thus purchasing from you and not others. In these days, the range of social commerce has been expanded to include social media tools and content used in the context of e-commerce, especially in the fashion industry. Examples of social commerce include customer ratings and reviews, user recommendations and referrals, social shopping tools (sharing the act of shopping online), forums and communities, social media optimization, social applications and social advertising. Technologies such as augmented reality have also been integrated with social commerce, allowing shoppers to visualize apparel items on themselves and solicit feedback through social media tools. Some academics have sought to distinguish "social commerce" from "social shopping", with the former being referred to as collaborative networks of online vendors; the latter, the collaborative activity of online shoppers.

Timeline

Elements

The attraction and effectiveness of Social Commerce can understood in terms of Robert Cialdini's Principles of InfluenceInfluence: Science and Practice":

Types

Social Commerce has become a really broad term encapsulating a lot of different technologies. It can be categorized as Offsite and Onsite social commerce.

Onsite

Onsite social commerce refers to retailers including social sharing and other social functionality on their website. Some notable examples include Zazzle which enables users to share their purchases, Macy's which allows users to create a poll to find the right product, and Fab.com which shows a live feed of what other shoppers are buying. Onsite user reviews are also considered a part of social commerce. This approach has been successful in improving customer engagement, conversion and word-of-mouth branding according to several industry sources.

Offsite

Offsite social commerce includes activities that happen outside of the retailers' website. These may include Facebook storefronts, posting products on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks, advertisement etc. However, many large brands seem to be abandoning that approach. A recent study by W3B suggests that just two percent of Facebook's 1.5 billion users have ever made a purchase through the social network.

Measurements

Social commerce can be measured by any of the principle ways to measure social media.

Business applications

This category is based on individuals' shopping, selling, recommending behaviors.

Business examples

Here are some notable business examples of Social Commerce:

Facebook commerce (f-commerce)

Facebook commerce, f-commerce, and f-comm refer to the buying and selling of goods or services through Facebook, either through Facebook directly or through the Facebook Open Graph. Until March 2010, 1.5 million businesses had pages on Facebook which were built by Facebook Markup Language (FBML). A year later, in March 2011, Facebook deprecated FBML and adopted iframes. This allowed developers to gather more information about their Facebook visitors.

History

The "2011 Social Commerce Study" estimated that 42% of online consumers had "followed" a retailer proactively through Facebook, Twitter or the retailer's blog, and that a full one-third of shoppers said they would be likely to make a purchase directly from Facebook (35%) or Twitter (32%).

Influencer marketing

Micro-influencers are designers, photographers, writers, athletes, bohemian world-wanderers, professors, or any professional who could authentically channel things that speak about a brand. It is clear that these channels have fewer followers than the average celebrity accounts, most of the time they have less than 10,000 followers (according to Georgia Hatton from Social Media Today ), but the quality of the audiences tends to be better, with a higher potential for like-minded tight-knit community of shoppers eager to take recommendations from one another. This topic has been also discussed by many other organizations such as Adweek, Medium, Forbes, Brand24, and many others.