Editor’s Introduction 29(1)
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 29, Number 1, 2025, pp. 1-3.
Social commerce (s-commerce) is an important, and growing, component of e-commerce. It encompasses a variety of steps building on social media and directed toward a business transaction that may or may not culminate in the consummation of such a transaction. These steps, all enabled by social networks, include posting of promotional material; consumer ratings, reviews, and recommendations; individual influencing; consumer exchanges of information and opinion extending from “likes” to narratives; group-buying demand aggregation; and actual purchase and postpurchase activities. In the quasi-social setting of virtuality, consumers are enabled to co-create value for the sellers and for each other [6]. On some social media platforms, s-commerce has emerged as a full-fledged integrated commercial activity.
As it amplifies user engagement, s-commerce has a mutually reinforcing relationship with other collective aspects of social media and with brand enhancement. The continuing growth of social media and the time spent using them by consumers feed the growth of s-commerce. The volume of purchase transactions that originate on social media is assessed at $72 billion in 2024 in America, constituting 6% of the total online sales, up from $47 billion in 2022, and with the projection of $100 billion in 2026 [5]. The convenience of transacting without leaving a social media platform cannot be gainsaid.
With its growth and its evolving nature, s-commerce requires research attention, and has received a fair dose of it. The intersection of the social and the commercial is fruitful while sometimes fraught territory—which means extensive research is needed to understand its design, contingencies, and effectiveness. Over the years, IJEChas published a landmark special issue [3] and numerous papers devoted to various aspects of social commerce (to mention here as examples only [1,2]). Notably, the research work published here has addressed the co-creation aspect of online collaboration [4], which tightly brings together the social and the commercial in its motivations.
The present issue of the IJEC continues the presentation of this research stream with an integrative paper devising and validating a model of social commerce success. Xiaolin Lin, Saonee Sarker, Mauricio Featherman, and Xuequn Wang empirically study the antecedents of this success in the context of double-homing, with brands reaching consumers via more than one site where both social and commercial features are available. The study of the differential approaches of the two platforms to s-commerce enables the researchers to draw conclusions that contribute to our understanding of the s-commerce success factors in transacting as well as in the consumer co-creation of value that accrues to the brands, platforms, and other consumers. Further parsing out this value allocation is indeed a subject for the future work in the area.
A different aspect of social media is the object of the empirically based study by Ram D. Gopal, Afrouz Hojati, and Raymond A. Patterson. As is commonly known, social media suffer (and so do we all) from abuse in the form of misinformation, disinformation, and just plain indecency. This leads to the need for content moderation of diverse nature and potency. Along with the obvious direct effects, such moderation has unintended consequences. The authors identify these in the context of a policy change at Reddit that at the first glance appears quite innocuous. The researchers’ analysis of the natural experiment will help in crafting the badly needed future moderation rules across social media platforms.
The third paper of the issue continues the investigation of social media. The author, Vahideh Arghashi, comes back to the nexus between socializing and buying. With the theoretical lenses of the accumulation of social capital and latent state-trait, the researcher draws up the connection between the compulsive use of social media to increase one’s social capital and impulsive buying behavior. We note the contribution to our understanding of the darker sides of social media, as they breed such undesirable behaviors as posting at any cost to the truth and the consumption of others’ attention, as well as unnecessary purchasing at the cost to oneself. Notably, the social platforms and the brands may value a different side of such behaviors.
Crowdsourcing platforms are making a positive contribution to the global distribution of labor, as the work offerors and the remote workers are able to negotiate and conclude a work engagement. Sometimes things go awry and the offerors are in a position to demand a refund. The dynamics of such requests are the subject of the empirical study grounded in a large archival data set, authored by Fangze Dai, Lingfeng Dong, Liqiang Huang, and Yu Tu. The contingencies in making a refund request and in a live-chat negotiation trajectory are explored in the light of the extant theoretical knowledge and contribute meaningfully to this knowledge. In fact, the paper expands our understanding of requesting and making amends in marketing and sales, a well-known way for the brands to reverse a negative sentiment.
A stimulating paper by Jackie London, Jr., and Marie A. Yeh goes to the borderlands of engagement stimulation online. It presents a study of the effects of the social exposure to the video depiction of transgressive alcohol-related behavior on the online posts. The authors find the use of transgressive content to be indeed effective in driving engagement with the platform—but at the cost of coarseness of the tone of the subsequent posts. We note that the videos considered in the empirics are user-generated. In other words, they are another—and quite sui generis—product of co-creation, if on the darker side.
The concluding paper of the issue, by Dingwei Gu, Tian Lu, Yingjie Zhang, and Pinliang Luo, presents a formal analysis of credit pricing on person-to-person (P2P) lending platforms. As do other platforms researched by the papers in the issue, P2P platforms confirm agency on the individuals, disintermediating traditional institutions, with the platforms acting as relatively less invasive and generally less costly intermediaries. P2P lending platforms activate privately held capital in the service of the best accessible use. There is, of course, a significant risk in transacting with unknown counterparties, and the platforms help set the price of a loan by providing the information about the borrower and the project, setting out the terms of the loan (a security, for example), and stating the base price (interest rate) for defined categories of borrowers, with the price further negotiated by the parties. The authors present a mechanism design for interest-rate setting in the context of the loan risk. The paper offers a worthy coda to the multifaceted IJEC issue, demonstrating the wide range of opportunities in conducting e-commerce in the platform environment.
Reference
[1] Chen, X., Liu, Z., Wei, S., & Liu, Y. (2021). Understanding the role of affordances in promoting social commerce engagement. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 25(3), 287-312.
[2] Kumar, A., Salo, J., & Li, H. (2019). Stages of user engagement on social commerce platforms: analysis with the navigational clickstream data. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 23(2), 179-211.
[3] Liang, T. P., & Turban, E. (2011). Introduction to the special issue social commerce: a research framework for social commerce. International Journal of electronic commerce, 16(2), 5-14.
[4] Nohutlu, Z. D., Englis, B. G., Groen, A. J., & Constantinides, E. (2023). Innovating with the customer: Co-creation motives in online communities. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 27(4), 523-557.
[5] What’s in store. The Economist, November 30 – December 6, 2024, 55-56.
[6] Zwass, V. (2010). Co-creation: Toward a taxonomy and an integrated research perspective. International journal of electronic commerce, 15(1), 11-48.