Website Features that Gave Rise to Social Commerce: A Historical Analysis

Social commerce is a form of commerce mediated by social media and social network services (SNS). As a multifaceted phenomenon, social commerce can be studied from different angles and analyzed through the lens of various disciplines. This article examines website technical features to depict the transformation of e-commerce into social commerce. We first develop a conceptual framework to capture three emphases of e-commerce: transactional, relational and social. Then, we use the framework to conduct an historical analysis of the actual website screen captures for five top e-commerce companies since their websites were established. We were able to identify and classify a total of 174 emerging technical features. Our results show that: (1) all three emphases were expressed in the websites and have been reshaping their business and marketing strategies over the years; (2) there was a clear blooming of social features in 2007; and (3) there has been a significant effort to strengthen customer and merchant ties through relational features. Our findings signal that there still is room for further exploration of the social emphasis.