Objective of the Study

Question:

Discuss about the Rise of Social Electronic Commerce.

Social electronic commerce is new subset of electronic commerce and it is involved with social media and online media. This study focuses on mainly on the impact of the recent emergence of social electronic commerce and its impact on business profitability. In the first part of the study, the main objective of the research project will be described. In the following section, scholarly articles and papers will be reviewed in the literature review section. Literature gap will be highlighted in order to explore research questions. This study will also provide research methodology and highlight the process of data collection for research project.

The objective of the project is to explore the emergence of social electronic commerce and its problems and opportunities on business. Objectives of the research project can be segregated:

• To explore the concept of emergence of social electronic commerce
• To highlight the problems and opportunities in social electronic commerce
• To recognise the impact of social electronic commerce on business profitability
• To recommend some possible strategies that a business can take in implementing social electronic commerce

The project covers the concept of social electronic commerce and its recent emergence in business premises. The scope of the study is broad as it discusses various ideas related to social electronic commerce. In recent time, businesses are taking the advantage of online market and social electronic commerce adds more marketing opportunity to reach maximum customers.

Social electronic commerce can be described as expanding strategy of e-commerce. This concept was coined in the year 2005 by Yahoo in order to measure product interest of the customers. Social electronic commerce has its own set of characteristics and shopping through using online platforms always inspires others to recommend and purchase. As stated by Bharadwaj et al.  (2013), social electronic commerce are of two types, first one is e-commerce site itself as this platform is managed by the owner of the company and other is social media sites and people can make comment about products by taking names. Some of the famous social electronic commerce platforms are Pinterest, Shoppe, Facebook and Soldsie.

As opined by Baethge et al. (2016), it is one of the biggest challenges for the e-commerce sector to impact on the influence of purchasing experiences. People can buy the products through online platforms and they can face the technological glitch or they can face issue from e-wallet. Moreover, when the products get delivered, customers may find that the products do not match the expectation of them. These types of experiences make the customers’ dissatisfied and they provide negative comments on social media pages or in community pages. As pointed out by Spencer et al. (2014), if the e-commerce has social interaction pages, users may provide negative customer experience as they might face cumbersome and lengthy process of purchasing the products.

Literature Review

In addition, customers read reviews of the products before making purchase and social interaction about those particular products can influence their minds. 40% of the customers leave the products and change their mind because of reviews gave on-e-commerce page in Australia (Alalwan et al. 2017). Customers switch the brand if the products have negative comments on review section and customers are no longer loyal to the brands. As highlighted by Castells (2015), organisations have been facing issues in making a perfect PR team who can adjust the brand reputation on social media pages as a single comment of the customer can go viral and harm the reputation of the brand.

Customers in a global context are shifting mainly to the online platform in order to buy their products. E-commerce disrupted traditional business model and people like to make a purchase from e-commerce. However, from the perspectives of e-commerce organisations, social interaction on e-commerce makes the business more transparent. Customers can make their decisions perfectly and they can interact with other customers before and after purchasing. Customers’ service teams do not now need to provide answers, other users can provide the clarification of any customers before that (Celine 2012). E-commerce companies are now getting better exposure and brand awareness because of social interaction on social media pages.

E-commerce businesses want to generate profitability from social electronic commerce through implementing this strategy. As suggested by Collins et al. (2014), e-commerce companies give extra discount or points in making review or comments of any products under the name of ‘verified customers’. Moreover, the e-commerce companies make a connection to the customers through doing surveys and polls. Business organisations are taking the help of social media analytics that provides respond the customers accordingly. Social media analytics bring development in understanding the behaviour of users on social media platforms.

Today’s generation is smart and technology friendly. Before making any purchase, they check users’ ratings and comments about the products. Before making decision of purchase from an e-commerce, they also search the users’ experience about this. As opined by Sashi (2014), social electronic commerce helps to get advice from trusted individuals and if the customers are not satisfied with the e-commerce site or products, people may not make the purchase from this e-commerce. According to Edosomwan et al. (2016), social electronic commerce provides customers to compare the products and research about the products; this advantage can lead to purchasing of the products also.

Concept of Social Electronic Commerce

In previous time, scholars identified the emergence of social media and e-commerce; they provided the benefits and issue both of these. Amalgamating the idea of social interaction on e-commerce is new. Social electronic commerce have several opportunities as well as problems. The businesses which work on social media platform have opportunities of enhancing their sales volume, expanding the markets and of innovating their products and services as per the requirements of the customers.

1. How does social electronic commerce can influence the customers’ decision making?
2. What are the problems and opportunities of social electronic commerce?
3. What could be some possible recommendations to business in implementing social electronic commerce?

In this project, the researcher will collect primary data. The researcher will gather qualitative data through conducting interviews. According to Mackey and Gass (2015), qualitative data is information about observation and quality that cannot be measured. The researcher will interviews 3 Australia based e-commerce managers through Skype. Moreover, the researcher will make 5 open-ended questions in order to ask e-commerce managers based on social electronic commerce’s challenges and opportunities.  

The sample size of qualitative research will be 3. The researcher will select non-probability sampling technique. According to Taylor et al. (2015), in non-probability sampling technique, samples are gathered in a method that does not provide all the persons in the population equal chances of being selected.

In qualitative research, the researcher will conduct interviews and the researcher will take only credible information from the interviews. The researcher will take interviews to the trustworthy managers. In addition, transferability is the ability to which the results can apply to other settings also. The researcher will corroborate the research findings on the secondary sources also and the researcher will definitely recheck the data.

In order to collect the quantitative data, the researcher will conduct a survey. According to Orkin (2014), quantitative data deal with numerical data that can be measured through quantitative and statistical analysis. The researcher will select 55 customers of e-commerce through social media pages who will be interested to answer survey questionnaire. The researcher will make 10 close-ended multiple type questions about social e-commerce and its impact on business profitability and preferences of the customers. The researcher will upload this set of questions on community page on social media network and ask the users to answers the questions. This survey data will be analysed with the help of quantitative data analysis and will be presented through tables and excel bar graph and pie-charts

The researcher will select the sample of 55 Australian customers of e-commerce organisations. Sample size will be 55. The researcher will select simple random sampling technique. According to Smith (2015), a simple random sampling technique is a subset of the statistical population through which each individual of the population has equal opportunity of getting selected.

Challenges and Opportunities of Social Electronic Commerce

The researcher will not be biased in analysing the quantitative data. In quantitative data, repeatability is the fact to become reliable as obtaining results can be repeated and it does not need reliability. The researcher will use focus group before making choice of sampling and in case the information would contradict with previous observation, the researcher will recheck the data and ensure conformability. 

The Researcher may face the issue of time constraint as being student it is difficult to continue a research. The budgetary limitation will be another issue for the researcher. Moreover, the researcher may face limitation in handling a large amount of data as a researcher will do both qualitative and quantitative research. The researcher would select the sample size of 55 in conducting a survey and only 3 for interview; this is quite a small sample. If the researcher would have got extra time, he would have chosen the large sample to get an unbiased judgement.

Table: Gantt chart

(Source: Created by researcher)

Conclusion

The researcher anticipates that respondents of the survey and interviews will put their views about social interaction on e-commerce. Social electronic commerce can also create high-level competition for the businesses and the other problem can be inactive users on the internet. At last, the strategic actions are discussed which can be taken while adopting e-commerce on social platforms. The companies should create an appropriate strategy before entering into social e-commerce and should build excellent social analytics so that the company can run on the basis of needs and requirements of the customers.

Reference List

Alalwan, A A, Rana, N P, Dwivedi, Y K and Algharabat, R, 2017. Social Media in Marketing: A Review and Analysis of the Existing Literature. Telematics and Informatics. 1(2), pp.43-45

Baethge, C, Klier, J and Klier, M 2016, ‘Social commerce—state-of-the-art and future research directions’, Electronic Markets, 26(3), pp.269-290.

Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O.A., Pavlou, P.A. and Venkatraman, N.V., 2013. Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights. International Journal of marketing. 9(1), pp.23-25

Castells, M., 2015. Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. John Wiley & Sons.

Celine, A.R.C.A., 2012. Social Media Marketing benefits for businesses. Master of International Marketing.

Clemence, A., Doise, W. and Lorenzi-Cioldi, F., 2014. The quantitative analysis of social representations. Abingdon: Routledge.

Collin, P, Rahilly, K, Richardson, I and Third, A 2014, ‘The benefits of social networking services’.

Edosomwan, S., Prakasan, S.K., Kouame, D., Watson, J. and Seymour, T., 2016. The history of social media and its impact on business. Journal of Applied Management and entrepreneurship, 16(3), p.79.

Mackey, A. and Gass, S.M., 2015. Second language research: Methodology and design. Abingdon: Routledge.

Orkin, K., 2014. Data Collection Methods. In Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (pp. 1430-1432). Berlin: Springer Netherlands.

Sashi, C.M., 2014. Customer engagement, buyer-seller relationships, and social media. Management decision, 50(2), pp.253-272.

Smith, J.A. ed., 2015. Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. London: Sage.

Spencer, S., Harding, J., & Sheahan, J. 2014. Social eCommerce: Increasing Sales and Extending Brand Reach. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”.

Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.