Social commerce: a taxonomy and cross-component investigation of business practices and technological choices
by Alessandro Marra; Paola Antonelli
International Journal of Electronic Business (IJEB), Vol. 14, No. 4, 2018

Abstract: Social commerce (SC) is a form of e-commerce (EC) that involves social media, online media that support social interaction and user contributions to assist the online buying and selling of products and services. Although SC has a straightforward definition, it is difficult to circumscribe SC firms' practices because of rapidly changing trends in digital markets, business strategies and new technological solutions. Collecting data concerning firms active in the EC sector, this paper provides an updated and extensive taxonomy of SC firms' business strategies and technological choices based on the seminal model developed by Wang and Zhang (2012) and, by means of a network analysis, proposes an original investigation of SC practices across the components of the model. Identifying preferred social channels, common technological requirements, payment systems, forefront marketing tools and so on, and realising the way each component interrelates with the others, has interesting implications for professionals, researchers and practitioners. Highlights of this paper are: large-scale business study on seven thousands e-commerce firms; extensive collection and organisation of metadata to describe firms' strategies and choices; updated taxonomy of social commerce based on Wang and Zhang (2012) seminal model; cross-component investigation to capture business and technological patterns.

Online publication date: Mon, 04-Mar-2019

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Electronic Business (IJEB):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com