Social commerce

Abstract

Social commerce is the kind of e-commerce which involves social interactions between users – product sharing, reviewing, group buying, content creation etc. – in the purchase journey. Owing to the nature of their platforms, commerce conducted end-to-end on social networking apps – from product discovery to final payment – is a major part of social commerce. This is different from social media marketing which redirects customers to the retailer’s website/app post product discovery. Traditional e-commerce suffers from high loss at every stage of the conversion funnel, primarily because the purchase journey involves a large number of steps, making the process cumbersome and leaving gaps, allowing for users to lose interest and abandon the process. Contrastingly, social commerce has the potential to increase user engagement at every step. User generated content to promote products can help in making them relatable, aspirational and inciting impulse purchases, discounts promoting group buying can help in increasing sales and virality of the platform, user generated reviews can aid in building more trust in the product and complete end-to-end process on the social networking app’s native platform can allow reducing the total number of steps in the purchase journey.