The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Social commerce: The transfer of power from sellers to buyers

Purpose



– The purpose of this paper is to provide a better picture of factors influencing behavioral decisions in online shopping by identifying different targets of trust and discussing their antecedents and outcomes. 




Design/methodology/approach



– Online survey data from 242 ihergo members were used to test the proposed model, and structural equation modeling with partial least squares was performed to analyze the measurement and structural models. 




Findings



– The findings show that the four types of trust identified in this study are critical determinants of perceived risk and attitude. In addition, the majority of the antecedents are found to be associated with their respective types of trust. 




Research limitations/implications



– The research extends the theory of reasoned action and prior research to discuss four types of consumer trust, as well as their respective antecedents and subsequent consequences. The result is a more descriptive model that better explicates consumers’ decision-making processes in online shopping. 




Practical implications



– Given the intense competition between online shopping sites, web site managers should strive to provide a safe and user-friendly shopping environment. In addition, the vendor can enhance trust by encouraging satisfied customers to provide positive endorsements. 




Originality/value



– This study is possibly the first of its kind, in identifying the four types of trust and their respective antecedents in the context of an online group-buying auction, and thus serves to enrich the existing literature concerning trust-building factors.

Understanding online shopping intention: the roles of four types of trust and their antecedents

This is the first article to describe how broadening of the term netnography in qualitative research is leading to misperceptions and missed opportunities. The once accepted need for human presence...

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Netnography: Range of Practices, Misperceptions, and Missed Opportunities

In recent years, social commerce evolved into an emerging phenomenon of global interest for marketers, businesses, and researchers alike. In light of this development, it is not surprising that the number of publications focusing on this phenomenon at the interplay of electronic commerce and social media has been rising substantially. The goal of this paper is to provide a structured overview of social commerce research by means of a structured literature review. Based on our literature search between 2007 and 2014 resulting in 116 published papers, we carve out and assess the knowledge and the research areas that have been predominantly addressed by the Information Systems, Electronic Commerce, and Marketing research community so far. By providing a research agenda, we hope that our results will stimulate and guide future research in this exciting field.

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Social commerce—state-of-the-art and future research directions

This article introduces Internet group purchasing (IGP) as a novel e-commerce phenomenon. Drawing on collective cognition and other relevant theories, we investigate the management of IGP by analyzing the four stages of IGP: (1) information accumulation, (2) interaction, (3) examination, and (4) accommodation. Netnographic methods were employed to collect qualitative data from eleven online group purchasing websites selected from hundreds of possible study websites. Analysis of the four stages of IGP lends support to the group-level cognition theory and makes contributions to collective cognition theory, especially as how it can be applied to the e-commerce context. It also situates group purchasing within the phenomenon of social networking marketing and discusses the symbiosis between IGP and businesses goals. Findings can help e-commerce practitioners to better understand online consumers and the manner in which they organize Internet group purchasing using social media. The research also provides managerial implications and directions for future research.

J. Whitney

Papers

The Power of Many: An Assessment of Managing Internet Group Purchasing