Social Commerce Solution Options

When it comes to looking at Social Commerce solutions it’s definitely worth looking at the bigger picture. Almost all the solutions being promoted today only deal with a fraction of the whole or require very significant investments.

Most companies and commentators define Social Commerce merely as connectors between commercial sites and transactions and social media. In practice the whole cycle should be considered as social commerce.

To achieve a fully integrated Social Commerce strategy there are three options open to companies:

1) Mix and Match

The option most people take is the Mix and Match approach. This normally includes a variety of different commercial, open source and SaaS solutions.

It includes solutions from all kinds of vendors including content management systems, newsletter software, DIY social networks, social ’voice’ services, and ecommerce vendors. There are potential advantages to this approach in keeping costs down initially or in allowing companies to build on their existing infrastructure.

The problem which arises very quickly though is that companies are forced to become software companies as an increasing part of the daily process involves managing software integration projects, software customisation projects and dealing with the technicalities of managing multiple disparate solutions with different life-cycles.

2) Enterprise Solution Stack

The Enterprise Software Stack is another option, provided by companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, as well as lesser players. This option is is often the right course of action if you have millions of dollars invested in the solution and service offering of one or more of these vendors.

The problem with all of them is that the solutions they offer and not built to natively drive Social Commerce. Rather they bundle dozens of solutions and services together to try and create a whole. This ends up being very costly, time consuming and complicated. It’s very much an outsize solution for most companies requirements when rolling out their online business.

The biggest issue with these vendors is that they inevitably try to tie you in to their solution stack rather than to integrate with the wider web ecosystem. This will more often than not is a disadvantage.

3) Affino

Affino has been built from the ground-up as a Social Commerce Suite. It is a single integrated solution which can be used to manage the entire online business cycle and integrates with the leading social, commercial and analytics sites and services.

Companies can manage the entire Social Commerce cycle within Affino and the seamlessly integrated social web. The rapid development cycle and rapid update services mean that Affino sites can always be kept at the leading edge of what’s possible online.