Business - Written Monday, March 9, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 0 Comments

Is Sears making a move into ‘social commerce’?

Back in early 2007 Don wrote about eBay’s foray into social commerce – the key idea being that the company was trying to integrate the emerging relationship and trust measurement tools of social networking sites directly into the transactional relationships and trust metrics currently employed by eBay to facilitate commerce. Or in the words of Mancini himself (The Senior Director of Platform and Innovation):

Our feedback system is based on transactions, as opposed to determining whether I can trust this person through some other relationship other than a transaction. We need to stay on top of this trend.

I haven’t heard as much about “social commerce” since then as I once expected (and a Google News search for “eBay social commerce” still has stories from 2007 at the top), but I was reminded of it today when I read the rather surprising TechCrunch story that Sears was acquiring Delver – A site in alpha mode that goes under the tag line “Your friends know you best. Search your world and find stuff that matters to you!”

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