From e-commerce to social commerce: exploring global trends

The electronic commerce (or e-commerce) can be broadly defined as “the buying and selling of products, services and information conducted by electronic means”. Even today, several years after the Internet revolution, this area continues to rise discussions and to leave a sense of confusion and misunderstanding, also because of the many disciplines involved and the multiple contexts in which the term is used. Therefore it is necessary to further clarify the different themes developed around the electronic commerce, analyzing characteristics, approaches and classifications in order to have an overall view. This is the right premise to look at future developments of this phenomenon. In fact, taking advantage from new Web 2.0 tools, as well as from social media impact on everyday life, the e-commerce is evolving toward a new form of commerce, the social commerce. A particular application of social commerce is represented by F-commerce, otherwise known as electronic commerce via Facebook.