TY - GEN
T1 - Impact of social influence in e-commerce decision making
AU - Kim, Young Ae
AU - Srivastava, Jaideep
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Purchasing decisions are often strongly influenced by people who the consumer knows and trusts. Moreover, many online shoppers tend to wait for the opinions of early adopters before making a purchase decision to reduce the risk of buying a new product. Web-based social communities, actively fostered by E-commerce companies, allow consumers to share their personal experiences by writing reviews, rating reviews, and chatting among trusting members. They drive the volume of traffic to retail sites and become a starting point for Web shoppers. E-commerce companies have recently started to capture data on the social interaction between consumers in their websites, with the potential objective of understanding and leveraging social influence in customers' purchase decision making to improve customer relationship management and increase sales. In this paper, we present an overview of the impact of social influence in E-commerce decision making to provide guidance to researchers and companies who have an interest in related issues. We identify how data about social influence can be captured from online customer behaviors and how social influence can be used by E-commerce websites to aid the user decision making process. We also provide a summary of technology for social network analysis and identify the research challenges of measuring and leveraging the impact of social influence on E-commerce decision making.
AB - Purchasing decisions are often strongly influenced by people who the consumer knows and trusts. Moreover, many online shoppers tend to wait for the opinions of early adopters before making a purchase decision to reduce the risk of buying a new product. Web-based social communities, actively fostered by E-commerce companies, allow consumers to share their personal experiences by writing reviews, rating reviews, and chatting among trusting members. They drive the volume of traffic to retail sites and become a starting point for Web shoppers. E-commerce companies have recently started to capture data on the social interaction between consumers in their websites, with the potential objective of understanding and leveraging social influence in customers' purchase decision making to improve customer relationship management and increase sales. In this paper, we present an overview of the impact of social influence in E-commerce decision making to provide guidance to researchers and companies who have an interest in related issues. We identify how data about social influence can be captured from online customer behaviors and how social influence can be used by E-commerce websites to aid the user decision making process. We also provide a summary of technology for social network analysis and identify the research challenges of measuring and leveraging the impact of social influence on E-commerce decision making.
KW - E-commerce
KW - Social network
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=36849055511&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=36849055511&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1282100.1282157
DO - 10.1145/1282100.1282157
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:36849055511
SN - 1595937005
SN - 9781595937001
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 293
EP - 302
BT - ICEC 2007
T2 - Proceedings of the ninth international conference
Y2 - 19 August 2007 through 22 August 2007
ER -