Social E-handel?
- Hur närvaro av andra besökare påverkar utvärderingen av en webbsida
Internet - and the website - has developed into an essential key for the relationship between enterprises and its customers. Today, a website might be the first or only impression a customer gets of a company. With this in mind we have focused our study on customer evaluations on websites. Social presence and its impact on people have so far mostly been given attention in the research of behavior in physical environments. However, in the electronic marketplace this has so far been overlooked, which is why our aim is to study how the presence of visitors impacts other visitors on the same website. The purpose is to gain a deeper understanding on how the presence of other visitors impacts firstly, the perceived social presence of a website and, secondly, how it impacts communication effects. More specifically, we study how social presence and communication effects are affected when the presence of other visitors are shown in two different ways, with different sized numbers (small and large) and with face photos of people with different characteristics. It is a quantitative study designed as an experiment where all variables, except one, are controlled in order to refine the results. The results indicate, first of all, that the social presence of a website is impacted and increased when other customers? presence are presented to visitors of a website. What affect customers the most are face photos of other customers. The communication effects, as defined in the study, are not, however, significantly influenced when other customers? presence are presented.