Selecting Technologies for Social Commerce: Towards a Systematic Method

Social commerce, the use of social media in e-commerce, has become increasingly popular in research and practice. As social commerce initiatives are enabled by technologies, their success considerably depends on the ability of companies to select adequate candidates from the available social commerce technologies. However, with the popularity of social commerce, the number of technologies is steadily increasing. Without guidance, the selection of technologies becomes cumbersome and risky. Moreover, while social commerce initiatives are most effective if they combine multiple different technologies, existing software selection approaches are limited to a specific technology and only support selecting one product from a set of technologically equivalent alternatives. Combining design science research with action research, we therefore propose a new method to support the selection of multiple complementary social commerce technologies. The contribution is twofold: (1) we propose a procedure model that describes the problem of selecting a set of multiple technologies as tailor-made decision-making process; (2) we introduce a technology assessment catalog as a consolidated information base to assess social commerce technologies with respect to their impact on customers’ buying behavior. The results of an evaluation in a social commerce project indicate that the method supports the selection of social commerce technologies.