Online Shopping Study Can Help Explain the Internet's Social Connections

Studying the evolution and function of online shopping communities could teach computer science researchers about online community-making in general, experts at NJIT said in a series of recent papers. 

The papers cover the methods and motivations of how shoppers interact with each other online, and examine such communities depend on members’ participation and contributions, according to doctoral student Yu Xu and Assistant Professor Michael Lee, both of the informatics department of the Ying Wu College of Computing.

Until now, Xu explained, most research about online shopping was intended to help corporate sellers. Xu cares more about social and relational perspectives of the shoppers themselves. He aims to understand their contributions, interactions and participation in such virtual communities.

In his most recent work on these issues, which involved conducting 20 interviews, meeting with 24 focus groups and receiving 194 survey responses, Xu concluded that the four types of shoppers who engage with others online are contributors, explorers, followers and opportunists.

Contributors, Xu said, are the most active members of online shopping communities. Reviewing products and advising other shoppers is practically their hobby. Explorers enter the communities to browse and participate in discussions, but not necessarily for specific products. Followers are passive readers, Xu explained. Opportunists participate for specific objectives and then disappear until they're shopping again.

Roles could change over time. "In addition, we discovered that the personas identified in this study are dynamic and transitional. As a result, users may also develop the contribution behaviors as they participate within online shopping communities," Xu stated in the open-access journal Multimodal Technologies and Interaction.

These relationships happen in discussion forums, review platforms and social media. That much isn't new, he acknowledged, as product discussions also happened regularly in the days of Internet relay chat and dial-up bulletin board services. Even retired distinguished professors Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, the co-inventors of EIES — Electronic Information Exchange System, which was a social networking ancestor built at NJIT from the 1970s through 1990s — predicted online shopping communities in their book, The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer in 1978.

Xu said he found inspiration for the research by participating in online gaming communities, where players could share advice about matters such as the best products and where to purchase them. Other uses of community software are websites such as Stack Overflow for computer programming advice and Wikipedia for crowdsourced encyclopedia entries. Online dating and group event planning, such as Match.com or Meetup.com, are also good examples.

"Our findings suggest that a socially connected and interactive community benefits both the informational and emotional exchange within the communities," Xu concluded in the Multimodal article. "Based on the findings, we discussed a series of design implications to identify user types, facilitate user interaction to form bonds-based commitment, and encourage contribution behaviors among community members."