Swamynathan, G., Wilson, C., Boe, B., Almeroth, K., and Zhao, B. Y. Do social networks improve e-commerce? : a study on social marketplaces. In WOSP ’08: Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1–6. [URL]

———–

This paper aimed at answering a simple question: “do social networks improve e-Commerce”? Given the rapid growth of online social networks, the authors were interested in understanding whether transactions conducted between friends could have any quantitative difference with transactions conducted with strangers.

To study the convergence of social networks and e-Commerce the authors took a representative web site, namely Overstock Auctions, where users have the possibility to create both networks with their friends and with business partners. One of the running hypothesis that the authors had was that users could trust more a partner in their social network than a complete stranger and therefore conduct more transactions inside their networks than outside.

The authors found that while the majority of users do not engage in social networking, those who transact with friends generally obtain significantly benefits in the form of higher user satisfaction. The authors conclude that with sufficient adoption social networking can have a dramatic positive impact on online marketplaces.

Prus, R. Shopping with companions: Images, influences and interpersonal dilemmas. Qualitative Sociology 16, 2 (1993), 87–110. [URL]

————

This paper describes a sociological study conducted to understand “how do people accomplish shopping activities”. Particularly the author was interested in understanding the role of “shopping companions”, who might be seen helpful and desirable in many occasions and distractors in many other circumstances:

“… marketplace settings often have been contrived to encourage or entice prospective buyers to part with theirs goods by offering these in exchange for other items. It is in acquiring goods or entering into exchanges that buyers most prominently express themselves in the action around which the marketplace exists. … the presence of shopping companions adds further complexities to these encounters. Shopping companions might seem to represent clear allies for the shoppers and are often appreciated by shoppers, but shoppers also tend to be concerned about both companion interferences and influences.“

The author further organizes the discussion on shoppers experience differenciating between: a) task vs. recreational approaches to shopping; b) mutuality of shopping styles; c) getting help with shopping activities; and d) the dynamics of influence in group shopping ventures.

a) When shopping is approached as a task to be completed with some efficiency (e.g., buying grocery items), people tend to be more concerned about companions assisting or negating their effort in one or other ways.

b) Mutuality of shopping styles consists in the congeniality of shopper-companion, the consistency of shopper-companion intensities in shopping, and their financial consonance.

c) te major forms of aid involved advice and general assistance. Adivice generally revolves around companions’ definition of products and products applications. This factor involves the risk that buying a certain item entails and the knowledge or expretise of the companion. Even when they felt knowledgeable about products, many shoppers still indicate that they value second opinions of items they contemplate purchasing.

d) Shoppers are generally concerned about maintaining self direction while shopping with companions. Companions appear able to encourage or discourage others to make more purchases that would have been the case otherwise. Some shoppers reported to have developed strategies to avoid influence from companions.

“… shopping is an activity characterized by ambiguity, embellishment, and risk on the one side and obligation, desire, and (often) irretrievable commitments on the other.”

Bohnenberger, T., Jameson, A., Krüger, A., and Butz, A. Location-aware shopping assistance: Evaluation of a decision-theoretic approach. In Mobile HCI ’02: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (London, UK, 2002), Springer-Verlag, pp. 155–169. [URL]

———

This paper describes a PDA-based system that give a shopper directions through a shopping mall on the basis of a) the types of products that the shopper has expressed an interest in; b) the shopper’s current location; c) the purchases that the shopper has made so far.

The authors built this system on the assumptions that the user might have a series of needs before going shopping. However, the authors cautions on how people often have considerable freedom in determining what particular location to visit for their shopping activities and that they might not have a clear understanding of their shopping needs.

One of the problem m-commerce application need to solve is how to deal with the uncertainties that are inherent to any attempt to match customers with products. For instance a user’s need might be generically specified as “something amusing to read on the plane”. These kind of needs might be difficult to operationalize for any intelligent interface.

In the study reported in this paper the authors focused simply on optimizing the path the user has to take in order to buy a list of items. They built a PDA-based prototype and set up a fake shopping mall. They asked 10 user to shop with the PDA assistant and 10 with a paper map. They found that the group using the PDA solved the task faster.

Dholakia, R. R. Going shopping: key determinants of shopping behaviors and motivations. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 27, 4 (1999), 154–165. [URL]

———

This paper describes a study of how the changing social pressure on going shopping impacts on married households. In particular the author focused on two constructors: sex and shopping context which determines shopping responsibilities among households members.

The starting premise of this work is that shopping is a genedered activity. However, the author cautioned on how social changes such as the increasing number of women in paid work force, may eventually reduce or eliminate some of these sex differences. To find out the author conducted a large scale survey, involving 1600 responses.

Results show that shopping is still a gendered activity with women assuming primary responsability for household grocery shopping. For clothing shopping women even share responsibility for shopping of men’s clothing. However, the male role is not insignificant. The data also clearly showed that grocery stores and shopping malls represents very different shopping experiences and that the male/ female role is contingent upon the specific context. The recreational and expressive nature of shopping at the mall seems to appeal more to the femal shoppers.

Yoh, E., Damhorst, M. L., Sapp, S., and Laczniak, R. Consumer adoption of the internet: The case of apparel shopping. Psychology & Marketing 20, 12 (December 2003), 1095–1118. [URL]

———–

This article describes a conceptual model of how people purchase apparel online, which combines the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and components of a theory of innovation adoption (Rogers, 1995). In the former theory, behavioural intentions are a function of two perimary determinants: the attitude toward the object and the individual perception of normative social pressure. Additionally, a social-norm component incorporates an individual’s belief of a reference group over his/her behavior. The latter theory provides valuable insights for understanding the decision making process related to internet apparel shopping.

People who had more positive beliefs about Internet apparel shopping had more positive attitudes toward Internet apparel shopping. People who had more positive attitudes toward Internet apparel shopping had greater intention to purchase apparel through the Internet. In addition, people who had more social support to adopt Internet apparel shopping perceived more social acceptance of Internet apparel shopping and, in turn, had greater intention to purchase apparel through the Internet.

Rich, S. U., and Jain, S. C. Social class and life cycle as predictors of shopping behavior. Journal of Marketing Research 5 (February 1968), 41–49. [URL]

———

This is an old study of how social class might represent a good predictor of shopping behavior. The authors conducted a large interview study with women in Cleveland, US. They found that at that time, newspaper was a great surce of information for women. Through this study, the author were able to understand that social class distincitions have been obscured by rising incomes and educational levels.

Traditionally it has been held that consumer buying behavior can be classified by social class and stage in the family life cycle. Recently it has been suggested that these distinctions have been obscured by the leveling effects of social and economic changes. From data of an extensive empirical study of women’s shopping behavior, the authors suggest that in many instances the earlier market segmentation concept may be outmoded.

O’Hara, K., and Perry, M. Shopping anytime anywhere. In CHI ’01: CHI ’01 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2001), ACM, pp. 345–346. [URL]

——-

This paper presents a field study that was conducted to understand in which particular situations people whant to buy something but for some reason they defer their transaction. The author motivate this research question by explaining that m-commerce applications are built as demonstrators rather than compelling applications. Additionally, they felt that most research on consumer behavior was directed towards advertisers. They found little user understanding that can directly inform design of new m-commerce devices and services.

They used a “photo diary” approach. They gave a disposable camera to 16 participants, asking them to take a picture every time they deferred a transaction impulse. Participants took an average of 36 pictures during the course of a week. Half the opportunities for fulfilling deferred transactions could be supported by direct interaction between mobile devices and the transaction objects themselves (e.g., barcode-scanning). Also, the majority of deferred impulse were generated at home (e.g., provisioning of goods). Thirty percent of deferred impulse were generated in a shop or in front of a shop window.

They summarized these finding by indicating three major implications for design: a) consumer behavior is social and collaborative. One reason participants deferred their impulse fulfilment was because they needed to seek reassurance and advice about potential purchases. b) Information seeking and analysis not in the moment. Transactions were also deferred due to the lack of information at the point of impulse generation. c) Consumption is not a pinpoint decision process. It is more useful to think about consumer behavior as transaction narratives from an impulse seed to a final transaction. Many participants talked about mental wish-lists.

Mangleburg, T. F., Doney, P. M., and Bristol, T. Shopping with friends and teens’ susceptibility to peer influence. Journal of Retailing 80, 2 (2004), 101–116. [URL]

————

Research on adult consumers indicates that, when adults shop with friends, this co-shopping has certain advantages for retailers, namely that co-shopping adults tend to spend more time in stores, cover more of the store’s area, and spend more money. Given that such positive effects have been found for co-shopping adults, it seems likely that shopping with friends would be even more important and relevant for teens and, thus, also have a significant and positive impact on retail performance. Peer groups are a particularly strong source of influence in the teenage years.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social influence of friends might be related to teens’ retailing attitudes and behaviors. The authors’ basic premise was that teens’ evaluations of retailing are an output of a social comparison process with co-oriented others. Specifically, they proposed that shopping with co-oriented friends provides teens with information and normative standards by which teens may evaluate retailing phenomena.

To test these ideas, they collected data from high-school students via a survey design. They found that susceptibility to interpersonal influence from friends was significantly related to teens’ enjoyment and frequency of shopping with friends, which, in turn, were generally related to sentiments toward retailing and spending tendencies. However, the pattern of findings suggests that informational influence may be a more important basis in shaping retailing attitudes and behaviors, while normative influence from friends is not and may even have negative effects. This is consistent with results from other studies indicating that people are more influenced by the information that groups provide rather than by group pressures to conform. It appears that teens are more susceptible to friends’ informational influence, which, in turn, affects teens’ retailing attitudes and behaviors.

Chiang, H.-K., and Liao, Y.-W. An agent-based framework or impulse-induced mobile shopping. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT’04) (Wuhan, China, 14-16 September 2004), pp. 509–514. [url]

————-

This paper describes a framwork for mobile commerce which follows five principles: 1) the omni-present availability of an agent-based system that can inform the user with relevant information when s/he access the application; 2) the system being pro-active in displaying relevant information; 3) location-aware, therefore modifying the information given to the shoppers based on the shopping context; 4) collaborative, allowing communication between friends; finally 5) customizable to the users’ needs.

Yesterday, I participated in MobileMonday here in Barcelona. This is a community of mobile professionals that promotes mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking. They organize presentation every once in a while to disseminate nice ideas. Yesterday, they invited four Mobile Social Media start-ups to present their concept ideas.

Udo Szabo, presented the OVI Technology platform. Udo presented the main concepts behind the idea of the OVI framework. Basically, Nokia understand that the growth of the mobile marked will not provide new revenues in the future unless they concentrate in providing new mobile experiences to their customers. They started to study carefully how people use mobile media and they found interesting differences compared to traditional desktop media. For instance, they found that on a mobile phone people like to use their real name instead of their nickname because when we share location it makes sense to know who you are. Therefore, people are willing to disclose their privacy. Also, he highlighted how the convergence achieved in mobile phones creates complexity instead of simplifying things. Their philosophy, incarnated in the OVI platform, consists on simplify experience by offering consistently adaptive interfaces and focussing on what is personal and relevant. The OVI differ from their previous products because the way they defined context. Context increases relevancy, allows people to connect in new and better ways, and connects the online and virtual world. Their OVI platform will be open source. Nokia will be announcing the release of this software and new related hardware this week at Nokia World 2008.

Sampo Karajalainen presented Mini Friday, the mobile interface of Habbo Hotel. It is a mobile virtual world available for Nokia Series60. Sampo revealed some interesting facts during the presentation. For instance, they had over one million virtual characters created in Mini Friday since they started one year ago. This is still little compared to the 130 millions avatars created in the web portal but still it reveals nice possibilities for mobile interfaces. Also, Sampo explained how virtual services take off in unexpected places. For instance, they found that over 18% of their accounts, the largest chunk, were created from Indonesia. Also, they found that people connected mainly from home instead that during commuting time. Others findings were more expected: shorter and more frequent sessions compared to the sessions in the desktop portal. One of the mayor challenges that they have to deal with the limited attention span that users have for elements of the interface because while mobile, attention switches between real and virtual world continuously. The challenges that we need to fight are always the mobile frameworks fragmentation, the latency of mobile phones and the data pricing. However, this case study shows also the new forms of communication enabled by virtual worlds.

Peter Vesterbacka presented ConnectedDay, a service for the daycare sector: the providers and their parents. Peter started from the assumption that it is difficult for parents and kids to share their daily activities when it comes the dinner. So, they designed a service that would enable parents and kids to share media. The main idea is to give to the daycare providers a mobile phone with a dataplan and the application (paid by the parents). By using the software preloaded on the phone, the educators can take pictures of the kids and add descriptions of the activities. This material is uploaded in realtime to a browser-based interface, accessible by the parents. Additionally, the daycare centers can reuse this material for documentation and publication purposes.

Finally, Peter Green presented Ramblas Digital a mobile social media. I have to admit that I was quite tired and I might be missed the point of Peter’s presentation. He presented lots of examples of polls created through SMSs that are usually used in public events and the results projected on a big screen. He said that they started this as a fun game and they are thinking to transform this into a startup.

Finally, Jonathan Wareham led the closing panel on mobile social media. I took a couple of random notes about ideas which I found interesting:

1- more research should be devoted in unlocking the social nature of the phone book;

2- we witness an incredible raise of freely available data from which we can extract knowledge. For instance, Google found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

3- Do we have to establish a governance in social networks? It is difficult to manage networks with more than 150 friends. Interfaces might constitute a big issue for this problem (e.g., blog’s conversations are usually serial, while we do not think in linear ways).