SOCIAL COMMERCE IN A DIGITAL ECONOMY: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE
GABRIEL, Justin M. O.
Department of Management, Faculty of Management Sciences,
Rivers State University, Port Harcourt
gabriel.justin@ust.edu.ng or m.justbriel@gmail.com
and
GABRIEL, Linda O. J.
Department of Marketing, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education,
Port Harcourt, Rivers State
ABSTRACT
The digital economy is one depicted by a structural shift from the industrial economy towards an economy characterized by information and communication technologies (ICT). This paper reviews literature on social commerce in the context of a digital economy. Social commerce is a form of e-commerce that is based on the utilisation of social media and Web 2.0 technologies to assist “buyer interaction that leads to the creation of active content; such as reviews and recommendations that guides other buyers when making decisions that inform their purchasing of products and/or ser-vices. Social commerce was observed to differ from e-commerce in several ways, but especially on the ground that e-commerce was designed using one directional Web 1.0 technologies, which dealt with customers as individuals; whereas social commerce was designed and enabled by Web 2.0 technologies which enabled bidirectional interactions between the business and customers. Different models of social commerce including those of Huang and Benyouncef, as well as Yadiv’s were identified. This paper concludes that social commerce has ushered a new dawn that has met the people of this generation with new ways of doing business where buying and selling occur more in the cloud.
Keywords: Social Commerce, Electronic Commerce, Social Media, Digital Economy