Telruptive

eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe, says that ecommerce is over and social commerce is the next thing. Social commerce is all about having a mobile with you and checking which of your friends or family has bought this item in the past. If your friends say “not good”, then you are likely to say “no purchase”. Additionally social commerce allows for online shops to steal away purchases from brick-and-morter shops.

Social commerce in its most basic form should be about having your social network help you to make the right decisions. However for guerilla marketers this is a new heaven in which mouth-to-mouth publicity can be “influenced” with the likes of Facebook…

How can operators do social commerce?

For their own services, it can be as easy as having a Facebook integration in their online shop that says which friends have purchased the service and how satisfied they are. It means that all the telecom catalog is added to Facebook’s social graph so people can see who is using what and what is their feedback.

Operators could go a step further and make a social commerce PaaS to allow everybody that has something to sell to use social commerce. A good social commerce PaaS should offer:

• The basics for a regular white-branded web and mobile shop (web/mobile store, unified catalog, shopping carts, white-labelled billing, analytics, reporting, provisioning, payment gateways, etc.).
• Integration into social networks (all catalog items are automatically added to Facebook, Twitter, etc.; tools to engage communities with loyalty/rewards; open stores in Facebook, eBay, Amazon, etc.; blogs, socialCRM, Youtube videos, etc.)
• Support tools (sales tracking, ERP connectors, helpdesk tools, etc.)
• APIs to manage all back-office tasks (e.g. procurement, shipping, etc.) and to automate all processes (adding products to a catalog, etc.)
• Value-added services: NFC payment for mobile that support it, billing & subscription management via your telecom invoice, call center on-demand to support customer’s customers, etc.

Operators should not reinvent the wheel and partner with existing players or solution providers that can provide parts of the overall platform.

Revenues can come from sign-up fees, monthly subscriptions, revenue share, resource usage, etc.