Now in this post I want to talk about Social Commerce. 

 Social Commerce is a buzz, evoking a fusion of Social Media and  E-commerce.  Social Commerce  is a subset of electronic commerce that employs social media tools to assist online buying and selling. Some examples of social commerce are user ratings and reviews, social networking tools, online stores in social networking and social shopping,as mentioned before.

On the web we find different definitions of Social Commerce, I write here some of these:

“social commerce enabling consumers to browse,view and add products to a shopping cart, within the context of a social site,like Facebook or a blog.” Fumi Matsumoto (Allurent)

“social commerce connect and foster active partecipation with customers to help improve your customer experience,includinf ratings and reviews,blogs as well as forums and communities”. (IBM)

But what are the reasons for doing Social commerce?

Fumi Matsumoto CTO of Allurent, the company market leader in powering superior online shopping experiences, in the E-commerce Times talk about social commerce, that offers 7 reasons for doing it. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/68744.html.

I briefly write here what are these reasons that Matsumoto consider important for doing Social Commerce:

1) Your customer are increasingly spending time.                                                                                                     

2) Shopping is often a social activity and people will want to shop online in the same way.

3)Peer validation that is built into social commerce, and for many shoppers it’s important.

4)Produce discovery is more fun and encourage to impulse purchase when in a social context.

5) If we don’t have presence on social media,your competitors will take illegal the social bran mind-share.

6) Social it’s the mosre cost-effective way to capture traffic and market reach.

7)Social media gives you the ability to extract data and obtain market intelligence more effectively.

Every consumer relies on a specific type of social websites or company website for product and brand information. As a result, companies try to engage directly with them using this social network creating a great opportunity to not only reach more consumers, but also increase their likelihood of making a purchase. But companies should be very careful in using digital marketing tools because they have to consider the impact of online word-of-mouth that can affect the consumers purchase decision.

In Italy ecommerce websites struggling to get out the stage of comparison of products. In fact it is proposed an online consultation of the product for the next purchase in store, what in slang is defined infocommerce.
Today the sales strategies of company aims to consolidate brands. The ommunication of products put in the websites strengthens the brand and becomes a vehicle to test consumers behaviour and satisfaction of customers.

Companies not engaging in social media as part of their online marketing strategy are missing an opportunity to reach consumers.

Sometimes it can also happen that I see something interesting on the Internet and then I decide to go shopping downtown to look for that particular article. This is what is called Mixed-mode selling.

The only thing I don’t like to buy online are clothes and shoes. I am really worried about the sizes and I spend hours and hours thinking about which could be the size that best suits me. Buying clothing online has a lot of advantages. Think about the availability, but what really makes the difference is the price: I could find a pair of Vans shoes on Amazon which costed HALF of what they costed in the nearby shop!!!

So guess what I do to be sure of what I buy online and save money…

I go to the nearby shop, I try the shoes and then I kindly say “oh, I’m sorry but I don’t really like these shoes!!!”. As soon as I get home, I order them on the Internet.

How do marketers call this kind of behaviour? I would suggest that the name “reverse mixed-mode buying” could fit the situation