How Social Commerce Emerged

Abstract

Individuals perform social interaction with others through online communities, which support their decision behaviour on the Internet. These abilities are mostly due to the rise of social networking sites through the recent development in Web 2.0 technologies such as social media. The increasing popularity of social media and social networking sites has developed e-commerce to social commerce. Social commerce is a new stream in e-commerce, in which consumers use social media in their purchasing journey. In this social climate, the social commerce era, consumers provide social support for the network by not only persuading consumers to have more interconnectivity with their peers, but also by giving a number of unique opportunities to firms. In this chapter, the author discusses the way social commerce has been emerged. As social word of mouth is one of the key constructs of social commerce, social word of mouth as well as the applications of social commerce and social support theory in business context have been explained in detail in chapter.