A Social Commerce Platform Aisha Ahmed AlArfaj1,2 aiaalarfaj@pnu.edu.sa Ellis Solaiman1 ellis.solaiman@ncl.ac.uk 1School of Computing, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 2College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. ABSTRACT The advancement of social media and e-commerce have created a new model of online shopping, which is called social commerce. Social commerce platforms need to integrate social features with commercial functions to improve user experience and to enhance trust between consumers and sellers. Current social media platforms such as Instagram, mostly focus on social aspects with limited commercial functions. Also traditional e- commerce websites have commercial capabilities but with limited social features. In this demo, we present an interface for a social commerce platform that integrates both social features and commercial functions to help consumers in their purchase decision processes. CCS CONCEPTS • CCS → Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI) → Interaction techniques KEYWORDS social media, e-commerce, social commerce, trust 1 Introduction Recently, the use of digital and networking technologies has created new opportunities for online commerce, and has helped people to connect and communicate. Social media helps businesses to attract potential customers and to make use of user-generated content to find out about customer needs[4]. Leveraging the user-generation capabilities of social media has created a new form of e-commerce known as social commerce [4]. Social commerce can be defined as the use of social media to assist purchase decisions [5]. It is also defined as the use of social media and social network services to exchange information that is related to shopping and to conduct online transactions [4]. Many studies recommend the creation of social commerce platform prototypes, which can be tested to gather insights into user interactions and behaviour [1][2][3][5][6]. Indeed limited studies have been conducted to develop such a prototype and to discover the desired and essential features to build a successful social commerce platform [5]. We follow a design and user- oriented research methodology to develop our prototype based on theoretical research, and user research by conducting interviews, observations, and co-design workshops. 2 Platform Overview Our social commerce platform is a mobile platform that includes both social features and commercial functions to improve the user experience and to enhance trust. There are two types of users, sellers and buyers. Both of them will have profiles to represent themselves. Figure 1 illustrates one of the interfaces for a social commerce prototype. We have developed an interactive prototype that combines both social features and commercial functions. 3 Conclusion Social commerce platforms provide entrepreneurs with new ways to sell trusted products and services, and to help consumers in their purchasing decisions. Research and development of social commerce applications can provide important insights for both the business and HCI computing communities. We hope that demonstrating our prototype application will help gather important data and feedback, and also help with highlighting the importance of our research to the community. Copyright 2019 held by Authors, DOI: 10.18420/ct2019-096 Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, contact the Authors. C&T 2019, June 2019, Vienna, Austria Demos and Posters, Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies WOODSTOCK’18, June, 2018, El Paso, Texas USA F. Surname et al. Figure 1: Shop profile REFERENCES [1] Aisha Ahmed AlArfaj and Ellis Solaiman. 2019. Investigating Commercial Capabilities and Trust in Social Media Applications for Entrepreneurs. In In Proceedings of ACM C&T conference (C&T’19)., 11 pages. [2] Aisha Ahmed AlArfaj, Ellis Solaiman, and Lindsay Marshall. 2019. Why would you buy from a stranger?” Understanding Saudi citizens’ Motivations and Challenges in Social Commerce. In The 17th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT. [3] Cadelina Cassandra, Rudy, and Desi Maya Kristin. 2018. Website quality impact on customers’ purchase intention through social commerce website. 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