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Social shopping is a method of e-commerce where shoppers' friends become involved in the shopping experience. Social shopping attempts to use technology to mimic the social interactions found in physical malls and stores. With the rise of mobile devices, social shopping is now extending beyond the online world and into the offline world of shopping.
Social shopping spans a wide range of definitions but can largely be divided into five categories: [1] Group shopping sites, Shopping communities, Recommendation engines, Shopping Marketplaces, and Shared Shopping.
Social shopping sites may generate revenue not only from affiliate marketing, advertising and click throughs, but also by sharing information about their users with retailers. Some sites concentrate on the user interactions that pass on information and recommendations that are hard to acquire from sales personnel.
Social shopping sites motivate their users to participate in ways. Many sites offer nothing of specific value in return, relying on the user's intrinsic sense of social reward to share information with the community. Other sites offer tangible rewards for sharing information. Other sites offer incentives in the form of reputations points that can be redeemed for gifts.
Social shopping can also exist in the real-world beyond the obvious swapping of consumer stories with people one knows. For example, when you walk into a dressing room, the mirror reflects your image, but you also see images of the apparel item and celebrities wearing it on an interactive display. A webcam also projects an image of the consumer wearing the item on the website for everyone to see. This creates an interaction between the consumers inside the store and their social network outside the store. The technology behind this system uses RFID.
There are various ways for stores to use social shopping features. Some websites offer a combination of comparison shopping with social features. Others combine physical stores and social features, for example, allowing customers to share finds and deals from physical retailers through the phone and website and interact with users that have similar shopping interests.
Some websites use established online social networks and tools rather than trying to build their own. By implementing applications like Facebook Connect which allow users to ask their Facebook friends' opinions on purchases directly on the social shopping site. Others implement the Twitter API, allowing their users to share content through tweets. Similarly, there are also social shopping applications that utilize existing networks to integrate users' social networks with shopping that aggregates sales offers from Instagram using the API.
E-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is in turn driven by the technological advances of the semiconductor industry, and is the largest sector of the electronics industry.
Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary, companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet.
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.
The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social interactions form the basis of much online activity including online shopping, education, gaming and social networking services. The social aspect of Web 2.0 communication has been to facilitate interaction between people with similar tastes. These tastes vary depending on who the target audience is, and what they are looking for. For individuals working in the public relation department, the job is consistently changing and the impact is coming from the social web. The influence held by the social network is large and ever changing.
Amazon China, formerly known as Joyo.com, is an online shopping website. Joyo.com was founded in early 2000 by the Chinese entrepreneur Lei Jun in Beijing, China. The company primarily sold books and other media goods, shipping to customers nationwide. Joyo.com was renamed to “Amazon China” when sold to Amazon Inc in 2004 for US$75 Million. Amazon China closed its domestic business in China in June 2019, offering only products from sellers located overseas.
Etsy, Inc. is an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of US$0.20 per item.
Product finders are information systems that help consumers to identify products within a large palette of similar alternative products. Product finders differ in complexity, the more complex among them being a special case of decision support systems. Conventional decision support systems, however, aim at specialized user groups, e.g. marketing managers, whereas product finders focus on consumers.
Group buying, also known as collective buying, offers products and services at significantly reduced prices on the condition that a minimum number of buyers would make the purchase. Origins of group buying can be traced to China, where it is known as Tuán Gòu, or team buying.
An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.
bidorbuy or bidorbuy.co.za is an English-language e-commerce website based on an internet auction and online marketplace model allowing individuals and businesses to trade with each other. Transactions on bidorbuy are in South African rands.
Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it is the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
Guided selling is a process that helps potential buyers of products or services to choose the product best fulfilling their needs and hopefully guides the buyer to buy. It also helps vendors of products to actively guide their customers to a buying decision and thus increases their conversion rate.
Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services.
Customer to customer markets provide a way to allow customers to interact with each other. Traditional markets require business to customer relationships, in which a customer goes to the business in order to purchase a product or service. In customer to customer markets, the business facilitates an environment where customers can sell goods or services to each other. Other types of markets include business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C).
Yardsellr was a San Francisco-based person-to-person online marketplace founded by former eBay executives in October 2009. It was shut down on February 4, 2013 to concentrate more on e-commerce at the short-lived social commerce site CompoundM.
Tmall, formerly Taobao Mall, is a Chinese-language website for business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail, spun off from Taobao, operated in China by Alibaba Group. It is a platform for local Chinese and international businesses to sell brand-name goods to consumers in Greater China. It has over 500 million monthly active users, as of February 2018. In the last few years, it has opened its features to brands, not only for online sales but also for developing brand awareness. According to Alexa Rank, it is the third most visited website globally in 2021.
Electronic commerce or e-commerce in Southeast Asia is the buying and selling of products and services over the internet in the countries of Southeast Asia. These practices reached Southeast Asia during the dot-com mania in the 1990s. After the dot-com bust, local e-companies have seen promising growth in this sector.
Konga.com is a Nigerian e-commerce company founded in July 2012 with headquarters in Gbagada, Lagos State. It offers a third-party online marketplace, as well as first-party direct retail spanning various categories including consumer electronics, fashion, home appliances, books, children's items, computers & accessories, phones and tablets, health care and personal care products. The company also has logistics service (KXPRESS), which enables the timely shipment and delivery of packages to customers.
There are many types of e-commerce models', based on market segmentation, that can be used to conducted business online. The 6 types of business models that can be used in e-commerce include: Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Consumer-to-Business (C2B), Business-to-Business (B2B), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), Business-to-Administration (B2A), and Consumer-to-Administration
Pakistan's e-trading mainly involves buying and selling goods and services using internet or telephone, through the use of electronic means such as computer, fax machine, cellular phone, automated teller machines (ATM) and other electronic appliances with or without using inter-net. Online banking, e-ticketing for air travelling, share trading in stock exchange are few examples of e-commerce of modern advancement. With its potential, e-trading can reduce the cost per transaction, increase efficiency, support contest, lower prices and boost international demand. It can open new areas for business in the service sector like on-line education, medical services, consultancy, and data exchange. It can also provide expansion in trade through domestic and international market research, advertising and marketing. In the financial services area, it can make easy and speedy transactions and transfer of money at a minimum risk. The interesting feature of online trading is that an investor simply sitting in his office or home can buy or sell through the Internet via mobile/tablet or PC and before being an experienced trader he may learn a lot by watching market screens or web portals at his convenience.