A framework for social commerce design

Interaction features of social web sites, including social networks and social media, enable a new kind of commerce referred to as social commerce (s-commerce). It refers to doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, through a uniform and interactive enterprise interface, by extending current social web sites initially designed for social interactions of individuals, to promote new business models. On one hand, none of the major social networks or social media providers has yet figured out how to bring commercial transactions directly to their platforms. On the other hand, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework to shape social commerce from both business and IT perspectives, which would guide a design process of s-commerce platforms. Indeed, s-commerce platforms differ from e-commerce web sites in many aspects from both business and IT perspectives and has more challenges in terms of (i) business models, architectures, principles, and even theories, (ii) complex constructs in terms of participants, interaction features, communities, and content, and (iii) issues such as social, control, security, and privacy issues. Therefore, there is a need for framing the elements of s-commerce, focusing on enterprise social interactions as first class citizens, in an abstract model that guides the architecture, the requirement engineering, the design, and the implementation of a uniform and interactive enterprise interface. Only this enterprise social interaction-enabling interface would promote the emerging knowledge and intelligence that are required for value (co-) creation in s-commerce model. This work fills the gap by proposing a framework that guides a design process to develop s-commerce.