Social commerce contributes multi-disciplinary knowledge concerning psychology, sociology, computer science, and marketing in business. Its development complicated due to various fields involved that range from arithmetic patterns to marketing management. In this study, we conduct a systematic review of social commerce research by synthesizing 407 papers from academic publications between 2006 and 2017. This study focuses on three overarching questions: (1) What is current social commerce research? (2) Which research methods have been used in social commerce? (3) What are some potential areas for social commerce research in the future? We delineate the various facets of social commerce – definitions, differences, types and technologies, challenges and benefits, models and frameworks – in an all-encompassing taxonomy that enables us to answering the first question. To solve the second question, we applied different methods and techniques. Finally, we offer guidelines on the directions for future research, and intend that this work will serve as a roadmap for understanding the research literature within the field of social commerce.

Introduction

Social commerce developed in tandem with the e-commerce evolution. It was introduced by Yahoo in 2005, and quickly became a means for adding value to commercial services through the use of customer engagement by major web companies, such as Amazon, Groupon and eBay (Wang and Zhang, 2012). In 2006, the first academic article appeared that explicitly used the term social commerce. In practice, the formal launch of social commerce was in 2009 when Flowers.com opened the first Facebook store (Busalim and Hussin, 2016). Statista (2017) reported that online orders referred through social media had an average value of US$89 in the second quarter of 2016. By 2019, enterprise social networks are predicted to generate more than US$3 billion in revenue worldwide (Statista, 2016). Despite rapid growth and important influence of social commerce, academic studies of these phenomena are in an early stage (Huang and Benyoucef, 2014). Social commerce research needs a systematic way to classify the various contributions. Efforts to synthesize the social commerce research in an integrated broad-based body of knowledge have been limited, however (Shanmugam and Jusoh, 2014). To fill the gap, we synthesized current research on social commerce as a basis for creating a theory-based taxonomy in several related areas and propose a research agenda. We also propose a systematic method by adopting a synthesis and a taxonomy appropriate to study social commerce (Koufteros, 2015). A synthesis with a wide-angled lens helped us to establish a better understanding of social commerce. A synthesis from as many fields as possible can clarify issues and pinpoint the position of each domain on an integrative map of social commerce (Williams, 2014). Therefore, this article contributes to the social commerce literature by synthesizing past research to provide a comprehensive and structured list of elements: research theme, theories, research methods, and outcome measures. A taxonomy is not only a neat way of leading to knowledge building and expansion, but is also a tool for dynamic and systematic storage, recall, sorting, and statistical analyses. It identifies gaps, current theoretical developments, and potential applications for existing theory (Eksioglu et al., 2009). There is thus a need for a social commerce taxonomy to be developed, employing a systematic approach, with a theoretical grounding that can be empirically tested for practical applications (Emamjome et al., 2014). Therefore, we contribute to research by developing the social commerce taxonomy with different facets: definition, types and technologies, challenges and benefits, models, frameworks, and the differences from other traditional concepts. These can be used by both researchers and practitioners. Accordingly, the primary objectives are: (1) to synthesize the relevant articles from multiple elements that generate an overall understanding of social commerce; and (2) to present a taxonomy of the literature from several fields of study in order to identify the major knowledge gaps in the area of social commerce. To achieve the main objectives of this study, we propose three key research questions (RQs). Answering these questions can help the reader understand social commerce including its definition, types and technologies, the influence (challenges and benefits), models, frameworks, and the differences from other traditional concepts, explain research methods and mathematical techniques that have been used in social commerce, and detail potential areas for future research. This research serves as a roadmap for research exploration on social commerce. It aims to improve the understanding of the state of the art of social commerce-related phenomena and to provide guidance to social commerce practice. This systematic review may offer directions for future research that will stimulate further interest in researchers and practitioners related to this emerging area.