Research Paper on Social Commerce Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

On Social Commerce - Research Paper Example Introduction Social Commerce, falls under the umbrella of electronic commerce with the notable feature of social media or online networks assisting, recommending or supporting the buying and selling of products. The origin of the term social commerce can be traced back to November 2005, where an article at Yahoo! first used the term social commerce to refer to the phenomenon of user ratings, pick lists and user generated content on the internet. Particularly, â€Å"Facebook, Groupon, Pinterest, LivingSocial, Tabjuice, Cafepress, Etsy and others are examples of social commerce websites† (Pearson & Zehr, p. 429). Importance of Social Commerce The entire idea of social commerce aims at harnessing the power of â€Å"word of mouth marketing†. There is much theoretical and empirical evidence about the power of â€Å"word of mouth marketing† and those customers are willing to trust the recommendation of their friend more than the advertising of a product running on prim e time television (Gibbons, p. 27). This is true because, in the past few decades, the number of advertisements and promotions targeted to individual customers have increased individually. Customers do not even notice most of these promotions, let alone buying the products and services based on those promotions (Davies, p. 108). On the other hand, in the recent past, corporations, businesses and their marketers have been accused of deceptive, manipulative, and deceitful techniques to promote their products in their pursuit of profits, something that has led to a widespread distrust on the advertising messages of corporations. A research from Nielsen, conducted in the year 2010, revealed that when purchasing cars over 90 percent of the customers trust the recommendations and advice of their friends. Only 33 percent of the customers appeared to be trusting advertisements and 59 percent of the customers rely on the input from the side of experts. In fact, another study from Wantlet rev ealed that just over 82 percent of the customers seek social input while purchasing goods and services (Pearson & Zehr, p. 429). Consider the fact that according to the statistics of March 2011, over 3.5 million businesses had their pages on facebook and a significant percentage of these businesses had created their business models around facebook, which meant that they did not have any physical presence (Kotler, Armstrong, Wong & Saunders, p. 37). Consider the example of BlendTec, a blend manufacturer, connects with customers using social media. The company maintains a channel on YouTube, with more than 0.5 million subscribers and statistics indicate that its videos have been viewed at least 181 million times. Furthermore, at least 85000 customers on Facebook and 7300 consumers on twitter read the tips and tricks provided by the company (Gibbons, p. 27). The company believes that maintaining a rigorous presence on the social media converts into added sales because it allows dissati sfied customers to find the solutions of their problems and satisfied customers to recommend the products of the company to other friends. In order to account that whether a particular like of facebook converts into sales, the company provides special coupon codes to its customers and then tracks the whereabouts of the redemption of those coupons (Davies, p. 108). Furthermore, the social media and social commerce efforts of the company are