Social commerce: a taxonomy and cross-component investigation of business practices and technological choices

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. © 2018 Inderscience. All Rights Reserved