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The key challenge for online retailers is to connect with consumers even as they become disengaged with typical marketing campaigns. According to a study conducted by marketing analyst Compete, Inc., retailers can achieve commercial success by directly involving consumers in promoting and selling their offerings. As such, social commerce innovators are using one of six strategies to integrate consumers into their sales and marketing efforts: branded micro‐sites, customer reviews and ratings, online customer forums, peer‐to‐peer transactions, product‐focused blogs and community‐created products.

Customer Reviews and Ratings

A critical aspect of social commercing is the ability to see user reviews and “other people who viewed this item also viewed” data. This information enables consumers to choose the product that best meets their needs and makes them feel comfortable with their purchasing decisions.

User‐Generated Content and Merchandising

According to e‐commerce software designer ATG, “[The year] 2008 will see e‐retailers explore the different ways in which their customers’ productivity can further drive sales.
One example will be the option of users creating and displaying all their favorite product catalogues on a single site. Customers will be able annotate their favorite Product engineering team, giving online retailers access to personalized information that can further drive cross‐sell and up‐sell opportunities.”

Similarly, This Next enables shoppers to explore and discover products and gift ideas based on other users’ recommendations. An interesting addition is the site’s global shopping activity map, which is a mashup of a world map with balloons showing what various shoppers are looking at and where they live.

Advanced Profiling & Targeted Advertising

Rather than basing personalized offers solely on an individual’s basket contents and browsing history, e‐retailers will begin to factor in demographic classifications, as well.
Factors such as a shopper’s location, age, ethnicity and salary will all have an impact on the ways he or she is targeted and the offers received. One way to gain access to this information is to integrate ecommerce solution with social networking sites. Tracking consumers’ movements across channels will also be a key area for improvement.

Convergence

More and more social networking and e‐commerce sites are beginning to consolidate multiple web services into a single portal. Open APIs (application programming interfaces) such as Google OpenSocial provide developer communities with the tools to create a collaborative platform that can integrate various web services to single point.
eBay, for example, has leveraged open APIs to make its software open to the public so that other websites can easily link to it.

Another example of this new convergence of social networking and e‐commerce is
TagWorld’s free online classifieds service. TagWorld, a high‐energy social networking space, enables its users to create personalized storefronts that can be incorporated into their personal web pages. Members can post items for sale in the classifieds section and have other members search for them by tags (subject, category, keyword, zip code radius, etc.). The service even utilizes PayPal to make payment for items easier. This free, easy‐to‐use service makes TagWorld attractive to people who want to sell items on the Internet but do not want to become a Power Seller on eBay.

As social commerce transitions from a trend to the norm, it is very likely that we will begin to see more and more convergence of social networking and e‐commerce websites. As far as who will become the leader in this market, it all depends on who can provide the most extensive and innovative shopping experience.