Social Commerce: Looking Back and Forward - Assignment Example

While all 15 websites were found to offer descriptions, pictures, and comparisons of different products to the users, only Amazon and Etsy enable users to do shopping after selecting the products of their choice. Social commerce websites were preliminarily categorized into direct sales and referrals. Reading reviews and forming unbiased opinions before buying is the most common practice in social commerce. All 15 websites have tag clouds as their basic feature. All 14 websites except Wists were found to provide their users with social channels.

Many websites developed links to external social networks over the years. All 15 websites use a variety of organization and management tools, with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) being the most common. Only 3 out of 15 websites, namely Amazon, WishPot, and Reevoo have provided mobile alternative sites as of 2010. Key milestones that help define social commerce today include but are not limited to Referral and Recommendation Systems, Mobile Apps, RSS, tagging, and geolocators. Social commerce activities started to show up in the late 90s with a variety of approaches to integrating social networks and channels.

Findings of this research support social commerce websites’ preliminary classification, realignment of the conceptualization of social commerce, and realization of new directions possible for social commerce.