Dear classmates!
This first post of me is related to “Social Commerce”. At first I did not really know what was meant by this concept, therefore I will share the definition which is being presented by IBM: “a subset of electronic commerce that uses social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to enhance the online purchase experience”. In short it is the combination of social media with e-commerce.
So now that we know what the subject is about lets us look at two examples that can be defined as social commerce. The first one is Amazon.com. You are probably familiar with amazon.com although you will probably use the “Dutch version” more often i.e.. Bol.com.
Amazon started with just selling online stuff on the internet. Today amazon incorporate a lot of other activities. The social aspect of amazon is that you can read what other customers have to say about a particular product. They also help you to get ideas by using the tool: “what other customers viewed”. Nevertheless people often first go to a store before they purchase the product online. Speculators therefore say that amazon should buy, “Best Buy” a large retail company in the US.
The other big idea that is out there is that in the future we will probably relay far more on online mechanism, i.e., omnichanneling (as being presented in the Harvard Business Review). This idea threats traditional retailer, because the consumer will have direct knowledge about information such as , lowest price etc. Personally I do not feel that traditional retailers would vanish from this earth, they just be more adjusted to work together with the online mechanism.
The other example that I will speak about is Pinterest. Personally I was not familiar with this website. I did however heard of it, but it did not capture my attention. Because of this “research” I made a Pinterest account and spend some time looking around. Still I do not see why approximately 7 million people are attracted to this website…
Maybe I am missing something, because I found several examples of companies that went from an unknown company to a big online company by the use of Pinterest. The principle here was simple. Their products where just pinned by someone who liked it. By pinning something you share and if someone else spots it they can re-pin it. With this a lot of people can see the product and demand it if they like it.
In some scenarios (Rodworks.com) the store did not had any online store yet. By receiving a lot of emails of people who wanted to buy their products they opened one that became very successful.
This is an example of the power of social media in general, the downside of this story is that Pinterest fails to make the profits of “selling” this products compared to Twitter or Facebook.
This are my findings, tomorrow we will here more about social commerce!
See you then!
Marjolein
