Understanding the niche strategies adopted by social commerce websites

Abstract

The rise of social media results in an attractive field called social commerce. Social commerce, a subset of electronic commerce, calls for appropriate strategies to support operation of social commerce applications and websites. When the characteristics of both social commerce and niche strategy are taken into account, niche strategy appears to be an effective method with initial success. As forms rooted in traditional niches, there are four typical types of niche strategies used by manufacturers, e-retailing platforms, and social media operators around the world, which are customer niche, topic niche, visual cue niche and process niche. As each type of niche has different motivation forms and constraints, when dealing with them, the operators should strive to strike the balance base on their own conditions.