Evolution of social commerce

Invesp Conversion Optimization made an infographic about social commerce last year. It reported that most popular social commerce features are social media buttons, rating & reviews, product recommendations and so forth. On top of that, seven types of social commerce were defined by by Lauren Indvik on Mashable in 2013. Social commerce is merely a term for e-commerce sites integrated with social functions or strategies.

Professor Huang and Professor Benyoucef from University of Ottawa created a social commerce design model to include four layers: Individual, Conversation, Community, and Commerce. This model further narrows down the definition and structure of social commerce nowadays. E-commerce sites can’t call themselves as social commerce by introducing some social plugins. At the Individual layer, personal, context and activity profile are the core of the site to create user identities. Content creation and connection are being addressed in Conversation and Community layer.

Driving by the ambitions of existing social media giants, social commerce will be transformed and become a new trend for both social media and e-commerce. According to the social commerce model, social media building a commerce layer on top of the existing social media would make them become social commerce. Adding one more Commerce layer won’t make them fly too high. The key is how commerce layer interacts and integrates with other layers.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media are very mature in Individual, Conversation and Community layers. It is challenging to integrate Commerce layer into the current system that all people are happy with. It sounds like very academic and theoretical. Let’s take Facebook as an example to explain the situation. Facebook can add an additional section called Shop in existing Pages. It is crucial how people can discover a product in a Shop, compare products between different Shops and relate products to social content. Without extensive integration, e-commerce would not become a revenue engine of social media. Also, people would not enjoy the shopping experience on social media.

One sentence to conclude: evolution of social commerce relies on extensive integration of social commerce layers.

Reference:

Seven Types of Social Commerce 
1. Peer-to-peer sales platforms (eBay, Etsy, Amazon Marketplace)
2. Social network-driven sales (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter)
3. Group buying (Groupon, LivingSocial). Products and services offered at a reduced rate if enough buyers agree to make the purchase.
4. Peer recommendations (Amazon, Yelp, JustBoughtIt)
5. User-curated shopping (The Fancy, Lyst, Svpply)
6. Participatory commerce (Threadless, Kickstarter, CutOnYourBias) collaboratively designing products.
7. Social shopping (Motilo, Fashism, GoTryItOn)