Empirical Investigation of Web 2.0 Technologies for Social Commerce and Implementation of Social App Prototypes

Abstract

Social commerce is a growing field due to the popularity of social media. Research on social commerce stresses the benefits of utilizing social media or Web 2.0 technologies for business because user contribution, participation and collaboration, which are characteristics of Web 2.0, fuel business vitalization. Nevertheless, there is a lack of academic research on social commerce, and in what little research there is, the coverage is circumscribed. One of the challenges is conceptualization of social commerce due to various definitions made from researchers’ different perspectives and different positions on social commerce. This also led to the limitation of scope of research. In addition, there is still a need for identifying technological features and business goals for social commerce. Therefore, this research primarily encompasses establishing the concept of social commerce and identifying its implementation methods. To amount to those two primary goals, the research objectives are to understand the factors that affect social commerce implementation; to identify and investigate applicable Web 2.0 technologies that enable social commerce activities; and to investigate the business goals that can be achieved by social commerce implementation. Ultimately, the research aims to address methods of implementation. Consequently, the achievement of this research is that first, the concept of social commerce has been established by refining several definitions from the literature. Second, social commerce activities and business goals were identified and categorized based on the marketing funnel concept and the new customer life cycle model. Third, applicable Web 2.0 technologies were identified from the literature and other functionalities were also seized from real cases. Finally, the concept of social commerce has been demonstrated by implementing selected various commerce applications