Design model of technical features for a social commerce website

Abstract

The shift of electronic commerce to social commerce draws tremendous opportunities for today’s retailers. Social commerce website is one of the prominent social commerce mediums that harnesses the social activities while shopping in online environment by leveraging Web 2.0 and social media. The effectiveness of a social commerce website is determined not only by the products or how well the website is marketed, but also by its rendition of technical features’ in terms of functionality (functional and non-functional). However, this particular area of social commerce is often overlooked especially when it comes to non-functional features. Under this circumstances, this study aims to analyze and propose technical features for social commerce website in terms of functionality. Based on the proposed technical features, a proposed design model is constructed. For evaluation, three different questionnaires were conducted for collecting data involving experienced social commerce users and experts on this area. The aim of the evaluation is to validate the proposed technical features and design model to ensure that they are accordance to the user’s expectation. Based on the results, all the proposed technical features were validated positively, thus, acceptable for this study. As for the design model, a slight change has been made based on the input by the experts for improvement. In having them applied as guideline while designing a social commerce website, hopefully this research will help researchers and practitioners to grasp the key elements in during the decision making.