Social Shopping Development and Perspectives

“Social shopping” (or social commerce), combining shopping and social networking, is an application of Web 2.0 in electronic commerce to benefit from users’ social networks. This paper explores the development of the emergent “social shopping” and related perspectives. It incorporates comparisons between social shopping marketing and search engine marketing. For example, search engine marketing assumes shoppers are certain of their shopping goal; social shopping marketing assumes shoppers are uncertain of their shopping goals and gather shopping ideas from their peers. In this paper, the challenges in social shopping development are identified, including governing shopper communities and retrieving content from social networking sites. The author concludes that social shopping and e-commerce are not dichotomous concepts. Social shopping can be an evolutionary concept, meaning a singular EC site advancing with social networking functions, or a synergistic concept, meaning EC sites connecting with the other social networking sites to form strategic alliance.