A Design Framework for Mobile Social Commerce

The use of mobile devices and social media has been increasing dramatically and becoming critical for B2C businesses. Such businesses need to consider implementing e-commerce services in the mobile environment with social integration to satisfy their customers’ needs. Concepts like mobile commerce and social commerce are already being used extensively by many businesses. However, there are no clear guidelines in the literature on how to use mobile and social characteristics together for B2C e-commerce. Fusing these two concepts is what we call mobile social commerce (ms-commerce). In this thesis, we performed a thorough literature review to identify the characteristics of ms-commerce. The findings enabled us to first devise a proper definition for ms-commerce as the concept of performing online commercial activities in a mobile environment with the help of contributions from customers. Second, elements of the building blocks of ms-commerce, namely business models, m-commerce and s-commerce were identified based on commonly accepted fundamentals of the related concepts. Each building block has a critical role in increasing the value and efficiency of the product/service being delivered online by B2C businesses. We propose a mobile social commerce design framework along with a modular design model consisting of a generic class diagram that can be used for designing and developing ms-commerce applications that fit the specific needs of businesses. Businesses can choose the right elements to integrate in their ms-commerce application with the purpose of increasing the efficiency and integrating the social participation of customers. Three different scenarios were devised, and three mobile app prototypes were developed to support them, using the design model of our proposed framework. Finally, in light of our experience in developing ms-commerce applications, we discussed and contrasted the three different mobile development strategies, namely native, hybrid and web-based