Web assimilation is the extent of organizational use of web technologies in facilitating e-commerce strategies and activities. Our definition focuses on the relative success of firms (as compared to other firms in the industry) in incorporating the Web technology into its e-commerce strategies and activities. This definition is consistent with perspectives on Type III IS innovations, with earlier treatments of IT assimilation at the organizational level (Armstrong and Sambamurthy 1999), and reflects our interest in understanding firms as innovation systems for attaining differential levels of technology assimilation success (Fichman 2001). We regard the level of assimilation to be one of the visible outcomes of the stream of structuring actions across the firm. Further, we anticipate the differential level of assimilation success across firms to be linked to the nature of the institutional enablers or the metastructuring actions within those firms.

Social commerce offers something radically different than traditional e-commerce by carefully blending buying and selling with a sense of urgency across communities

E-commerce sure is tapping the power of the crowds (think ModCloth, Groupon, FashionStake), but I wouldn’t call this social

what we’re calling online “social commerce” today doesn’t look what we’ve seen traditionally. In fact, so much of what we call “social commerce” is not done within our social graphs - rather it’s just any level of involvement of another human being in a user’s purchase decision

If the open source community really wants to make a difference, then the some focus should be directed toward back-end, e-commerce billing systems. The regulatory conditions of the market have reached a point where it is incredibly inefficient for them to be tracked and applied by hand.

The problem, as Taylor explained, is that the rise of e-commerce and social media has lowered the cost of entry for new competitors.