Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions.

The term social commerce was introduced by Yahoo! in November 2005 to describe a set of online collaborative shopping tools such as shared pick lists, user ratings and other user-generated content-sharing of online product information and advice.

The concept of social commerce was developed by David Beisel to denote user-generated advertorial content on e-commerce sites, and by Steve Rubel to include collaborative e-commerce tools that enable shoppers "to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them". The social networks that spread this advice have been found to increase the customer's trust in one retailer over another.

Today, the area of social commerce has been expanded to include the range of social media tools and content used in the context of e-commerce, especially in the fashion industry. Examples of social commerce include customer ratings and reviews, user recommendations and referrals, social shopping tools (sharing the act of shopping online), forums and communities, social media optimization, social applications and social advertising.

Erik Qualman (born 1972) is an American author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, and is a speaker within the Internet community. In 2010, Socialnomics was a Book of the Year finalist as voted on by the American Marketing Association. He is a columnist for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ Magazine.

Qualman was born and grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan in Rochester Hills. He attended Michigan State University receiving a BA in Marketing. While at Michigan State (1990–1994) he was named Academic All-Big 10 for Basketball. Qualman also holds an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas (1999). In 2011 Qualman gave the keynote address to the McCombs graduating class on the Austin, Texas campus.

He is currently the Global Vice President of Digital Marketing for EF Education headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland and a Professor of Digital Marketing for Hult International Business School's Masters program. Prior to joining EF Education and Hult, Qualman worked in online marketing and eBusiness functions at Cadillac & Pontiac (1994–97), AT&T (1998–2000), Yahoo (2000–03), EarthLink (2003–05) and Travelzoo (Head of Marketing 2005-08).