All about Social Commerce and our Solutions to create it

Why Social Commerce is much more than trending ?

Both eCommerce and Social Networking are growing gradually and therefore, there has been a major push towards Social Commerce where retailers or shop owners can offer consumers a more convenient and engaging online shopping experience.

More Social > More Engagement > More Sales

Word of mouth has always travelled fast, and in online world, it travels even faster

Whether it is the power of reviews or suggestions that people receive based on certain criteria, word of mouth spreads everywhere and is very influential.

Recommendations from friends or people you follow, plays a great role in shopping

A traditional store is never engaging. For almost everyone, shopping in a traditional store is simply a chore to be endured: If they can find ways to postpone or avoid it, they will. But what if browsing a store was fun, exciting and emotionally engaging? What if, it was as much fun as having a get-together with friends? The answer is Social Commerce!

Creating a self growing business model

Social Commerce helps influencing purchase decisions of shoppers. While browsing a social commerce website, users get engaged into social activities, those activities influence purchasing decisions, resulting in more purchases and those purchases create more activities on website. So, it basically creates a vicious circle - a self growing business model.

‘Social Sharing’ is NOT enough!

Sharing your products on social media giants is helpful, but not sufficient. Sharing helps to market your products across multiple channels but, can not help build engagement around your own idea or application. You need your own social commerce platform or an online community, if you are here to travel a long way. To help with this, we have developed following Social Commerce Solutions. Let’s have a look:

Social Commerce Solutions that we offer

1. SocialEngine + Magento Integration

Both SocialEngine and Magento are leaders in their respective domain. So, why not use combination of both to create an engaging Social Commerce Platform? Let’s have a look at some of the specialities of each platform:

Magento - the leading Ecommerce platform

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce solution that offers store owners complete flexibility and control over the functionality of their application. Magento’s SEO capabilities, catalog management and powerful marketing tools give merchants the ability to create sites that provides an incomparable shopping experience for their customers.

Magento’s user-friendly administration interface allows you to tailor your site to your unique business needs. Magento is the ultimate eCommerce solution, as it is completely scalable, best known for its robustness and backed by an extensive support network.

SocialEngine PHP - the leading Social Networking platform

This award winning platform helps to make diverse styles of social networking possible. It is best known for it’s ease of customization and a wide range of developer community and add-ons available for this platform. Some of the key reasons to use it for your Social Commerce application:

  • A complete Social Community gets created on its own.
  • It offers endless ways for users to connect, share and interact with each other.
  • Social Feeds or to be more precise, Activity Feeds of SocialEngine helps to build up engagement over the community. When integrated with Magento, activity feeds play a significant role as shoppers would love to see the feeds of the ones they follow or are friends with saying "Shopper X has purchased this product" and this activity feed would be likeable, commentable and shareable on community taking engagement a few steps ahead.
  • You can have features like Photos / Albums, Blogs, Events, Videos, etc. adding up more engagement to the community.

How it works:

We’ve created a SocialEngine + Magento Integration plugin, that can be hooked to SocialEngine PHP to integrate it with Magento and vice-versa. So, if you want to use these two platforms to create your Social Commerce application but, concerned about the complex integration and effort that it would require, then, stop worrying now! We’ve already taken care of that part for you and integrated both platforms well using this module.

2. SocialEngine + Stores / Marketplace Plugin:

SocialEngine benefits have been already discussed above. Another way of setting up a Social Commerce website is to use SocialApps.tech ’ Stores / Marketplace Plugin along with SocialEngine. It provides a complete eCommerce solution which enables you and your users to easily create Stores and start selling products online. It allows creation of both Admin-driven and User-driven Stores. With User-driven Stores, you can have an active Marketplace in your community. With social features woven around stores, you can get a great Social Commerce setup.

Let’s compare both the solutions on the basis of features or requirements.

Feature / Requirement SocialEngine + Magento Integration SocialEngine + Stores / Marketplace Plugin
Multiple Admin-driven Stores
Multi-Vendor Store or Marketplace
Multiple Websites under a single installation
Multi-Lingual Support
Multi-Currency Support
CMS Features
Robustness
Ease of website management
SEO Friendly
Ease of Customization
Performance & Scalability
Recommended for existing Magento website owners to add a social factor?
Recommended for existing SocialEngine website owners to add a commerce factor ?
Mobile Commerce
Ideally recommended for Large and Medium sized online businesses Medium and Small sized stores
Demo socialcommerce.magecube.com socialcommerce.socialapps.tech

Conclusion

Hopefully, you would have got enough idea of how these two solutions help to create Social Commerce Applications and how they differ from each other. It may not be always enough to compare these two solutions as, these cater to different business needs.

If you are already running a Magento-based store, and want to take your business one level up in the Social direction, then, the decision is simple - you can go with SocialEngine + Magento integration. If you already don’t have a Magento website running and are yet to identify and decide the best option to go with, then, you need to identify your core business needs.

Who Should Choose Magento with SocialEngine?

SocialEngine + Magento is a good fit for businesses that want advanced stores with full control and social flavour added. Generally, medium to large enterprises or those looking for a scalable solution will find Magento a better match compared to Stores / Marketplace Plugin.

Who Should Opt for Stores / Marketplace Plugin with SocialEngine?

Small to medium sized businesses that are not looking to scale up in the short run and initially, want to highlight the social features more, might find Stores / Marketplace Plugin to be a better solution. It is relatively cost-effective and feature-rich.

As you’ve been reading this article, there is no doubt that you want to create your own Social Commerce application. If you’re still not sure about which solution to go with, we are here to help you. Our team has years of expertise in doing development on both the platforms and can help you make the best choice and perfect application. Contact us now!

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