Shopping as a Social Activity: Understanding People's Categorical Item Sharing Preferences on Social Networks

Social commerce connects people’s shopping activities with their social communities. Much work has leveraged social network data to promote sales of products and services. However, less is known about the impact of shopping activities on people’s social relationships. This paper serves as foundational work in the field and addresses this gap by exploring people’s preferences in sharing products and services on social networks, in order to gather knowledge for future design of personalized online shopping and social experience. Our study shows that “Electronics & Computers,” “Home, Garden & Tools” and “Toys, Kids & Babies” are the most preferred product categories for people to share. Survey responses also identify that the factors of “Information” and “Sociality” highly impact what items people choose to share on social media. Additionally, this study explores the difference between participants’ intention and behavior when sharing items on their social network. We compared the results from two groups of participants and detected noticeable differences between people’s intent-to-share and actual sharing behavior in social commerce, generating interesting implications for researchers, businesses, and developers. Author