A framework for social commerce design
Introduction
The interaction features of social web sites (social networks and social media) such as connections, communications, and content sharing are expected to enable a new kind of commerce referred to as social commerce [20], [22], [24], [32], [34]. We define social commerce (or s-commerce for short) as a new way of doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, involving interactions among all the actors of the value chain. S-commerce aims at enhancing enterprise openness to enable actors׳ participation and collaboration, in order to achieve greater economic value to the whole value chain. It can be realized through a uniform and interactive enterprise interface that promotes social interactions, by extending the features of social web sites, which results in emerging knowledge and intelligence that are required for value (co-) creation in s-commerce. An enterprise architecture that considers social interactions as a new dimension can implement such a social interaction-enabling interface [5]. Therefore, s-commerce differs from e-commerce (specifically B2C) in many aspects from both business and IT perspectives, including motives, business and value creation models, challenges and issues, technologies, modes of interactions and communication (e.g., system interaction, customer connection and communication), and also the design of the platforms [4], [16], [17], [33]. For instance, e-commerce deals only with customers as individuals, whereas s-commerce sees the community of customers. E-commerce is enabled by Web 1.0, where the communication is one-way, whereas the s-commerce is enabled by Web 2.0, a platform that supports social web sites and allows bidirectional communication (for the interactions). Furthermore, s-commerce has more challenges in terms of: (i) business models, architectures, principles, and even theories [28], (ii) complex constructs such as participants, social interactions, communities, generated/shared content, and features that support social interactions, (iii) supporting architectures, infrastructures, platforms, and services (e.g., SOA and Cloud computing) [4], and (iv) issues such as social, control, security, and privacy issues [19]. For instance, the user perceptions, preferences, and decisions are influenced by the content generated by people interacting through social media applications, which may shift power from company to customer [17].
On one hand, none of the major social media providers has yet figured out how to bring commercial transactions directly to their platforms [25]. On the other hand, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework to shape s-commerce from both business and IT perspectives, which would guide the architecture, the requirement engineering, the design, and the realization of a uniform enterprise interface through collaborative and interactive platforms. Indeed, a very few studies focus on the s-commerce from the perspectives of modeling and design [17], [33].
Therefore, a framework (an abstract model) that guides the development of s-commerce in terms of architecture, requirement engineering, design, and realization of a platform that enables enterprise social interactions, taking into account their inherent issues, is needed. Only such a platform would allow the emerging knowledge and intelligence that are required for value (co-) creation in s-commerce. This work fills the gap by proposing a framework that shapes the relevant elements of s-commerce toward a reference architecture for s-commerce. The framework captures: (i) the relevant conceptual and technological entities of s-commerce, (ii) the relationships between these entities, and (iii) the constraints (if any). The framework would not only guide the description of s-commerce as a business model, but also guides the process to produce it. This process distinguishes the planning, the architecture, the requirements, the design, the implementation, and the evolution of the platform that supports s-commerce. This framework is significant to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and the lack of design processes for s-commerce.
The enterprise social interactions, core element of the framework, are conceptualized as first-class citizens (or main building blocks) for s-commerce. The other building blocks are participants, communities, and content. All of these building blocks together are described and refined at different levels of abstraction, i.e., the architecture, the requirements, the design, and the implementation. The architecture refers to the components of s-commerce and their connection to each other. The requirements explicit what kind of social interactions, participants, communities, and content are needed for s-commerce. The design shapes the building blocks with a set of principles and provides the design decisions and design patterns to further refine and transform the requirements into a uniform and interactive enterprise interface that promotes openness, collaboration, and participation through a sound and complete set of social features. The implementation concerns with the realization of a critical component of the enterprise architecture that is dedicated to s-commerce.
We expect this framework to add knowledge to both research and practice. Researchers can use this framework as a roadmap to further explore and explicit more issues to make it a reference model for s-commerce, as a social interactions-enabled business model. From a practical perspective, enterprises can use the derived design process to develop a platform that enables a motivated s-commerce, not only in terms of extending the existing social web sites, but also in terms of changing the way of doing business with a focus on social interactions. It is worth to note that the proposed design process describes what to do in each step; it does not refer to any process model (e.g., plan-driven, agile); the process model will be decided later depending on the nature of the requirements of the s-commerce project, which remains specific to each enterprise.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides related work to position this contribution. Section 3 details the framework. Section 4 presents the s-commerce web site constructs, design principles, and patterns. Section 5 details a five-step design process that derives from both the framework and the design principles. Section 6 applies the design process to a running case, a company marketing and selling laptops and accessories. Finally, a conclusion section presents theoretical and practical impacts, limitations, and open issues for further development.
Section snippets
Related work
The pervasive social web sites supported by Web 2.0, namely their powerful features such as connection, communication, opinion expression, and content creation/sharing have attracted the attention of researchers in the potential of such technologies for new type of commerce model, referred to as s-commerce. A number of studies have been carried out, covering s-commerce from different perspectives [17]. In [22], the authors state that social media technologies not only provide a new platform for
A framework for s-commerce
The framework captures: (i) the relevant conceptual and technological entities of s-commerce, (ii) the relationships between these entities, and (iii) the constraints (if any). It guides an architecture and a design process for developing s-commerce. We derive the framework by refining a comprehensive definition of the s-commerce (as artifact), that shows at least: (i) what does s-commerce mean, i.e., its essence or its form (ii) what s-commerce is made of, i.e., its architecture or structure,
S-commerce design constructs, principles, and patterns
In addition to the aforementioned abstract model that frames the main building and the requirement for s-commerce design, the social design provides the building blocks with a set of design principles to refine the framework. Social design identifies the main building blocks. It aims at exploiting the enterprise social interactions to add value to community. Fisher [12] sees three core concepts: identity, conversation, and community.
S-commerce development process
Deploying s-commerce web sites is a huge and challenging project. However, the above described framework and the design constructs, principles, and patterns guide the steps of a development process. However, since s-commerce inherits many properties from social web sites, we have different construction options. Each of the development options has distinct steps.
Running example
The CLT Company has already an e-commerce application to sell online laptops and accessories. The current web site allows consumers to select a laptop, view the characteristics, including the price and the selling condition, the basket to add items, and the payment.
CLT is willing to move its e-commerce web site to s-commerce web site to integrate the social web site features such as SLATES, 4RC, or social sharing features to enable, in a first phase, its customers to (1) interact around its
Conclusion
This work has provided an abstract model to frame the relevant elements of s-commerce and a design process.
First, the framework has distinguished the necessary conceptual entities from their enabling technologies, which provides the main building blocks of s-commerce that are: social interactions, participants, communities, and generated content. Then, the application of the social design techniques, the patterns of interactions, and the design decisions and patterns to the context of
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