Optimal marketing channel and strategy in social commerce

This paper aims to explore the optimal marketing channel of e-commerce enterprises with various consumer base size and product added-value in social commerce. By characterizing the consumer utility, we construct decision-making models of e-commerce enterprises under the traditional e-commerce platform (TECP) and two kinds of social commerce marketing channels involving “e-commerce platform + social” (ECPS) and “social media + business’ (SMB). Then, we obtain the optimal strategy of e-commerce enterprises for each channel by using the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions, and verify the effectiveness of the corollaries by numerical simulation. Results find that social commerce marketing channels (ECPS and SMB) are not necessarily better than TECP. For e-commerce enterprises with low consumer base size and low product added-value, the TECP channel offers the largest profit. Besides, SMB is the preferred marketing channel for most e-commerce enterprises.