Social commerce

About

Social commerce is a cross between social networking and commerce, where the value of transactions are maximized by social connections between vendor and buyer.

Maximization takes place in the following ways:

• buyer has an accurate idea of the quality of vendor's products
• vendor has an accurate idea of buyer's personal creditworthiness, including
  • what value buyer may have to offer in a vendor role (i.e. trade-out, possibly deferred)
  • buyer's resource situation (e.g. if buyer says "I will be able to pay for this next week", vendor has some idea of whether this is an accurate statement)

Not all transactions need to be between parties who know each other personally; it is enough that there are one or more chains of trust between buyer and seller, going in both directions.

Implementations

• Ripple and its derivatives are social commerce using chains of trust involving monetary credit