User preferences of social features on social commerce websites: An empirical study

The development of social media applications has given rise to a new e-commerce paradigm called social commerce. The social features inherent to these applications foster user interaction and contribution which facilitate the online buying and selling of products and services. But businesses face challenges in making their websites socially rich by implementing the features that address their customers' needs. Moreover, social commerce can be achieved in two ways: one brings e-commerce to social media platforms; the other brings social media to e-commerce websites. Faced with such choice, businesses need to understand their customers' preferences with regard to online social and commercial activities. To this end, we investigated user preferences of the social features implemented on current social commerce websites. Using a survey, we identified important features such as providing the “comment” button, encouraging users to respond to comments made by others, and providing product reviews. In addition to the practical implications consisting of insights for the design of social commerce, we found that, in presence of social and commercial features, users visit social networks mainly to socialize, and visit e-commerce websites mainly to shop. •A number of important and less important social features have been identified from current social commerce websites.•User preference differences of social features of the different social commerce websites have been found and discussed.•Design layer in social commerce design model is assessed and interpreted for guiding social commerce development.