Social commerce is increasingly drawing the attention of practitioners
and academics. Evidence from previous studies indicates
that social commerce is a new phenomenon that needs to be better
understood. This study conducted a systematic literature review,
explaining the social commerce concept, presenting its state-ofthe-
art, and describing the relevant features in social commerce
design. More importantly, a new conceptual model for social commerce
design has been introduced, with the hope of providing insights
into social commerce and the overall relationships among
the participants, the community and online commerce.
There are some limitations to this study though. For example,
our conceptual model was only applied to two social commerce
websites, which kept us from making our results more empirically
meaningful. The other limitation concerns the identification of ecommerce
and Web 2.0 design characteristics. The process of
selecting appropriate design characteristics and grouping them
into relevant design principles is based on the reviewed state of
the art. Hence, some characteristics may be found to relate to more
than one design principle, however, our study groups these characteristics
into one design principle based on their key features.
This study being the first step, a number of future studies will
be carried out. These include:
To build a social commerce prototype to validate the proposed
design model and relevant design principles.
To explore the design process and principles within the two categories
of social commerce (i.e., e-commerce-based and social
network based social commerce platforms).
To identify design patterns of social commerce by studying a
variety of real world social commerce applications from a software
engineering perspective.
The managerial recommendations of this research are as follows.
First, management needs to identify its existing e-commerce
and social networking applications and capabilities. They must
then decide on the way to develop their social commerce strategy:
to add social features to their e-commerce platform, or to add
commerce features to their social network platform. If they have
an e-commerce operation, they already fulfill the features in the
Individual and Commerce layers of our proposed model. They need
to implement the features in the Community and Conversation
layers. If they have a serious presence on social networks, then
they already fulfill the Individual, Conversation and Community
layers. All they need is to further implement the Commerce layer.