The Role of Social Shopping as an E-commerce Strategy

Abstract

Social shopping allows people to share experiences and comments, discuss, communicate and rate products on social networks, while shopping online. As the main focus of this work is social shopping, the topics of e-commerce and social commerce were studied, which are the base to understand the concept of social shopping. This study comes along boosted with the emergence and growth of this concept in business and the few studies done in the area. Therefore, while e-commerce is defined as digital commercial transactions between organizations and people, social commerce is defined as a new e-commerce business model, promoted by social networks, therefore presenting the differences between these two models. As the focus of this paper is social shopping, the differences between social shopping and social commerce were also explained, and their benefits. Finally, the role of social networks in social shopping was approached in an introductory way.