Bringing E-commerce to Social Networks

Social commerce is where e-commerce meets social networks. Links between social network users are being leveraged to generate and propagate word-of mouth about a products, services and brands, creating new business opportunities, and more specifically, a new channel for online business. However, a close look at the academic and practitioner literature on e-commerce and social networks reveals a clear lack of consensus on social commerce concepts and implementation mechanisms. We argue that without such consensus, social commerce might not reach its full potential. Therefore this paper starts by providing an overview of social commerce research and practice in light of the wide attention it has drawn recently. We then propose a social commerce framework consisting of three key parts, namely implementors, enablers and activities. Using Facebook APIs and plugins, we design, develop and deploy a set of social commerce applications as proof-of-concept of our proposed framework.