Impact of social influence in e-commerce decision making

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 others' 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 researc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ACMICEC
• Authors: Young Ae Kim, Jaideep Srivastava
• Keywords: ACMICEC 2007, Decision Making, E-commerce Decision Making, ECommerce, Social Influence