Social commerce

Social commerce[1] is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the 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.

The term social commerce was introduced by Yahoo! in November 2005[2] to describe 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,[3] and by Steve Rubel[4] 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[5] to increase the customer's trust in one retailer over another.

Today, the area of social commerce has been expanded to include the range of 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.[6]

Some academics[7] have sought to distinguish "social commerce" from "social shopping", referring to social commerce as collaborative networks of online vendors, and social shopping as collaborative activity of online shoppers.

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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.[8] In March 2010, 1.5 million businesses had pages on Facebook[9] that were built using Facebook Markup Language (FBML). A year later, in March 2011, Facebook deprecated FBML and adopted iframes.[10] Among other things, this allowed developers to gather more information about their Facebook visitors.[11] Experts forecast that F-commerce transactions on Facebook will overcome Amazon’s annual sales ($34 Billion) over the next 5 years.

Notable social commerce sites

Other:

See also

References

External links