Group Buying Research Articles

국내 반려동물전공대학생의 반려동물 의복추구에 따른 소비자유형과 반려동물 의류 구매의도의 영향요인

In this study, we explored the preferences and purchasing motivations of South Korean pet-related majors regarding pet clothing. Through big data analysis from sources like Naver Data Lab, surveys, and interviews, we identified diverse buyer groups in the pet clothing market. Our findings reveal that seasonal trends influence search and purchase behaviors, with factors such as usability, safety, lifestyle compatibility, fashion, satisfaction, and environmental concern influencing their choices. This insight enhances our understanding of the pet clothing market and provides valuable guidance for producers and retailers aiming to better meet pet owners' needs.

Community startup businesses: the impact of big five personality traits and social media technology acceptance on group buying leaders

PurposeThis study investigates how personality traits influence individuals’ intention to become community group buying (CGB) leaders.Design/methodology/approachData include 517 valid questionnaires that are employed to examine the research model and test the hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling.FindingsThis study reveals that among the Big Five personality traits, extroversion and neuroticism have more impact on the perceived ease of use and usefulness of social media, and individuals with high levels of these traits are more likely to become CGB leaders. Perceived ease of use only mediates the relationship between agreeableness and CGB leader intention, whereas perceived usefulness mediates the relationships between conscientiousness and CGB leader intention and neuroticism and CGB leader intention.Originality/valueThis study can serve as a catalyst for advancing the exploration of how personality traits and social media affect the intention of being CGB leaders. In addition, the study investigates the mediating effect of social media technology acceptance obtaining valuable insights into how social media affects individuals’ intention to become CGB leaders, expanding the research in this field.Highlights(1)Individuals with extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness personality traits exhibit higher perceived ease of use and usefulness of social media.(2)Unlike previous research suggested, neurotic individuals appear to be attracted to becoming community group buying (CGB) leaders.(3)Individuals with high agreeableness are encouraged by ease in pursuing CGB leadership.(4)Perceived usefulness mediates the relationship between conscientiousness and CGB leadership intention and neuroticism and CGB leader intention.

Konsep Jual Beli dalam Islam dan Implementasinya pada Marketplace

Islam is very concerned about all aspects of the lives of its adherents including the problem of buying and selling, especially the development of technology today makes transactions between sellers and buyers do not have to meet directly and products do not have to be delivered at that time. The purpose of the research is to find out how the concept of buying and selling in Islam and its implementation in the marketplace. This research uses a library research method with a descriptive qualitative approach, which describes and summarizes various variables and their situations and conditions. The results showed that the concept of buying and selling in Islam is based on the rules in fiqh muamalah that the original law of a muamalah activity is al-ibahah (permissible) as long as there is no evidence that prohibits it. The implementation of the concept of buying and selling in Islam in the marketplace based on the description of the marketplace transaction scheme in general, there are no transaction problems in it for both sellers and consumers, because it only acts as an online market that brings together a group of sellers and buyers.

A Hierarchical Attention Network for Cross-Domain Group Recommendation.

Many online services allow users to participate in various group activities such as online meeting or group buying, and thus need to provide user groups with services that they are interested. The group recommender systems (GRSs) emerge as required and provide personalized services for various online user groups. Data sparsity is an important issue in GRSs, since even fewer group-item interactions are observed. Moreover, the group and the group members have complex and mutual relationships with each other, which exacerbates the difficulty in modeling the preferences of both a group and its members for recommendation. The cross-domain recommender system (CDRS) is a solution to alleviate data sparsity and assist preference modeling by transferring knowledge from a source domain which has relatively dense data to another. The existing CDRSs are usually developed for individual users and cannot be directly applied for group recommendation. To alleviate the data sparsity issue in GRSs, we first study the cross-domain group recommendation problem and propose a hierarchical attention network-based cross-domain group recommendation method, called HAN-CDGR. HAN-CDGR takes the advantage of data from a source domain to benefit recommendation generation for both the individual users and groups in the target domain which has data sparsity and cannot generate accurate recommendation. In HAN-CDGR, a hierarchical attention network is constructed to learn and model individual and group preferences, with consideration of both group members' interactions and dynamic weights and the complex relationships between individuals and groups. Adversarial learning is used to effectively transfer knowledge from a source domain to the target domain. Extensive experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposal, providing accurate recommendation for both individual users and groups, are conducted on three tasks.

Decoding and integrating the facets of consumer empowerment: a study with consumers of high-involvement Product(s)

ABSTRACT This study presents an integrated framework for consumer empowerment, expanding on psychological empowerment and analyzing enablers, determinants, and outcomes in the context of high-involvement products. Through hermeneutic phenomenology and interviews with 18 consumers, new enablers (peer group, and purchase journey), determinants (purchasing power, and consumers’ freedom to explore, choose, and buy), and outcomes (peer recognition, and group buying) are identified. The findings reaffirm existing facets of consumer empowerment. The research contributes valuable insights for academics and managers, offering a holistic understanding of psychological empowerment in consumers and encouraging further exploration of this phenomenon.

International retail buying groups and consumer prices

The aim of the research described in this paper is to investigate the effect of international retail buying groups on consumer prices. The study focuses on EDEKA, the leading grocery retailer in Germany, and its membership in AgeCore, the largest European international retail buying group. The empirical analysis is based on an extensive EDEKA scanner dataset, including over 6 million observations of monthly consumer prices for 138,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) across 20 food categories, over a six-year period. The analysis shows that EDEKA’s membership in AgeCore led to reduced prices for its customers. These findings are consistent with recent studies on the influence of retail buying groups on consumer prices and contribute to an increasing body of evidence that international retail buying groups reduce consumer prices. The paper shows that international buying groups are a force for the good, as they contribute to reduce consumer prices while simultaneously offering a cost-efficient mechanism for retailers to create scale to obtain competitive buying conditions.

Determinants of Wholesale traders' participation in the purchasing consortium in Mbarara City, Uganda

Wholesale businesses globally face operational challenges that necessitate adopting new mechanisms, especially in buying strategies. Purchasing consortiums, particularly among wholesale traders, are presented in existing literature as a promising avenue for traders to enhance the quality and value of their services. Consortium members can negotiate better prices and terms than they could by pooling resources and bargaining with suppliers. Unfortunately, the concept is not well-conceived and adopted among wholesale traders in developing countries, particularly Uganda. This study focused on establishing the determinants of wholesale traders' participation in the purchasing consortium in Mbarara City. A qualitative approach was used to examine the precursors, the barriers to participation, and the opportunities for wholesale traders to participate in purchasing consortiums. Data was collected from wholesale traders, city authorities and association leaders using the interview method. The study found that socio-demographic factors such as income, ethnicity and business longevity greatly determine the success of purchasing consortiums. To promote group buying and facilitate business growth in Mbarara City, it is recommended that Mbarara City Authorities create an enabling environment and support traders in organising themselves to participate in purchasing consortiums. This will reduce their business burden and promote business growth, hence development in Mbarara city.

Group buying in multiple channels with consideration of heterogeneous customers

Group buying can create high demand for firms in a short period by offering significant price discounts to attract more consumers who are unfamiliar with the items and enhance their willingness to make purchases. However, group buying may negatively affect sales profits; thus, firms must consider the pros and cons of participating in a third-party group-buying platform. This study considers a firm that offers a new product through the direct channel, i.e., brick and mortar stores, and may also be on a third-party group-buying website; additionally, it develops a two-stage game model in which heterogeneous consumers with different perceived values for the new product are classified into strategic and group-buying consumers to investigate whether cooperating with a group-buying website would earn more profits for the firm. The contribution of this study is the proposed game model for adequately assessing both brick and mortar and group-buying sales under channel competition. The results of the investigation show that high network externalities can elevate retail prices and group-buying quantities but lower wholesale prices. If only one channel is considered, cooperating merely with the group-buying website is more profitable than cooperating with a single sales channel. In addition, third-party group-buying websites can offer appropriate promotional programs to improve demand and profit, and as a result, a win–win situation can be achieved.

Who Wants to Shop With You: Joint Product-Participant Recommendation for Group-Buying Service.

Recent years have witnessed the great success of group buying (GB) in social e-commerce, opening up a new way of online shopping. In this business model, a user can launch a GB as an initiator to share her interested product with social friends. The GB is clinched once enough friends join in as participants to copurchase the shared product. As such, a successful GB depends on not only whether the initiator can find her interested product but also whether the friends are willing to join in as participants. Most existing recommenders are incompetent in such complex scenario, as they merely seek to help users find their preferred products and cannot help identify potential participants to join in a GB. To this end, we propose a novel joint product-participant recommendation (J2PRec) framework, which recommends both candidate products and participants for maximizing the success rate of a GB. Specifically, J2PRec first designs a relational graph embedding module, which effectively encodes the various relations in GB for learning enhanced user and product embeddings. It then jointly learns the product and participant recommendation tasks under a probabilistic framework to maximize the GB likelihood, i.e., boost the success rate of a GB. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of J2PRec for GB recommendation.

How Group Leaders Build Stable Community Buying Groups: A Perspective Based on the Differential Mode of Association

How Group Leaders Build Stable Community Buying Groups: A Perspective Based on the Differential Mode of Association

Cooperation mechanism, product quality, and consumer segment in group buying

We analyze the cooperation mechanism in a group buying channel where a supplier sells products to heterogeneous consumers through an organizer. We consider two cooperation mechanisms: traditional wholesale mechanism and commission negotiation mechanism. In particular, suppliers often need to negotiate the commission fee with organizers who promote products in group buying. The organizer faces two types of consumers who differ in their valuation of product quality (i.e., informed consumers and one less-informed consumers). We identify the conditions under which cooperation mechanism and consumer segment can lead to ”win-win” and ”win-lose” outcomes for the supplier and the organizer in group buying. We find that the supply chain incentives are often misaligned under the wholesale mechanism because the supplier extracts the entire profit from the organizer. However, the supplier and the organizer have perfect alignment of preferences when the operating cost is medium and the bargaining power is not so high. We also show that, when the product quality is endogenous, the commission negotiation mechanism can generate more consumer surplus. The theoretical and managerial insights derived from this work contribute to a deeper conceptual and practical comprehension of how suppliers make strategic decisions in group buying settings.

How Group Leaders Build Stable Community Buying Groups: A Perspective Based on the Differential Mode of Association

Since 2016, community group buying has grown significantly in China, largely driven by its efficient logistics, supply chains, low prices, and convenience. This model has been further popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its effectiveness in meeting daily needs while minimizing human-to-human contact. A key component of this business model are the “group leaders” - influential individuals within a community responsible for managing group buying activities, which include order collection, supplier liaison, and goods distribution. Their primary task is to form and sustain a reliable community group buying consortium, a task that demands excellent organizational and interpersonal skills. This paper examines this phenomenon using the lens of the differential mode of association, a theoretical model explaining interpersonal relationships in traditional Chinese society. The research indicates that group leaders, through regular interaction with consumers, are able to alter their social network position, increase their influence, understand consumer needs, provide satisfying services, and enhance trust, thereby transforming consumers into loyal group buying participants. This transformation not only brings stability to group buying activities but also reinforces the community influence of group leaders, thus fostering the growth of community group buying.

Education Source Ultimate

Education Source Ultimate is one of many databases offered by EBSCO. It offers access to hundreds of videos and thousands of journals and magazines on education studies, many of them full text, peer reviewed, and/or open access. These different print and media resources address numerous educational topics, including research methodology, training, assessment, literacy, technology, and ethics, among many others. This database can be viewed in any of 31 different Asian and European languages. It offers both documents and videos, often on point for the query submitted, using a standard Advanced Search mechanism that is both usable and understandable. Pricing for this resource is determined by various factors, including full-time enrollment (FTE), consortium agreements, other EBSCO databases subscribed to, royalty requirements, and buying groups—all of which imply considerable variability in subscription price. The licensing agreement for this database, the standard one for all EBSCO resources, is 16 pages long and can be very detailed and technical. As such, it may not be easily understood by subscribers without the assistance of legal and/or information technology specialists. The quality and quantity of the content in this database are impressive and will certainly prove valuable to many researchers in education studies. Consequently, its primary audience will be colleges and universities, specifically those with education programs. It will be of only marginal use to others.

Unconscionability and Poverty

Matthew Desmond made the claim in Evicted, his powerful work on housing insecurity, that those concerned with alleviating poverty should focus not merely on ensuring that poor people have higher disposable incomes, but on countering the exploitative price gouging that depresses the value of whatever income they have. This suggests the possibility that it might be a worthwhile anti-poverty strategy for courts to use the unconscionability doctrine to regulate exploitative contracts. Three main issues follow from considering this possibility: (1) Do the poor actually pay more for goods of the same quality? (2) If they indeed pay more, do they do so because prices are exploitative? How should we define an exploitative price, and how can we identify that any particular group of buyers is indeed exploited? (3) Could courts seeking to make use of the unconscionability doctrine realistically identify cases in which poor people generally are overcharged, or will courts successfully invoke the doctrine to challenge unwarranted prices only when the price a particular seller charges exceeds some benchmark (e.g., the price charged before an emergency or the price charged to other buyers in highly similar transactions)? While there is (reasonably) good evidence that the poor pay more for equal quality goods and it is possible (but very hard to determine) that exploitative pricing is a genuine issue as well, efforts to use the unconscionability doctrine to solve the problem of exploitative contracts are quite unlikely to succeed. Doctrinal and practical constraints make this solution a bad fit. If we worry, for example, that small stores in urban areas with high concentrations of poor residents overcharge, we should probably look to establishing and sustaining less exploitative suppliers, not to using common law courts to police price gouging.

Competition and Bargaining - The Optimal Size of Buyer Groups

Competition and Bargaining - The Optimal Size of Buyer Groups

Unlocking B2B buyer intentions to purchase: Conceptualizing and validating inside sales purchases

This study focuses on understanding the purchase decision-making process of B2B buyers in the context of inside sales. While many studies have explored this topic in a B2C context, there has been little attention given to the unique features of B2B inside sales. To address this gap, we developed and empirically validated a buyer's intention to purchase (BIP) model that integrates the B2B purchase decision-making process and buying behavior theories. Using PLS-SEM analysis on data collected from 126 B2B buyers, we found that trust in sellers and connection flexibility are crucial factors in determining buyers' intention to purchase. Specifically, these factors influence the purchase intention via appointment and contact willingness during different phases of the B2B purchase process. Additionally, our multigroup analyses suggest that buyers' demographic and firmographic attributes affect the purchase decision-making process in different ways. By identifying different groups of buyers and their distinctive needs and preferences, our findings inform more effective approaching and selling strategies. This study contributes to both academic and sales practices by providing critical insights into the factors that influence the B2B inside sales process, which ultimately improve sales performance.

Unveiling Consumer Loyalty in Community Group Buying: A Comprehensive Analysis through the ECM-ISC Model

Unveiling Consumer Loyalty in Community Group Buying: A Comprehensive Analysis through the ECM-ISC Model

Comparative analysis of the purchasing behaviour of young consumers in Poland and Belarus on the organic food market

ObjectivesThe organic food market is growing rapidly. More and more consumers are becoming aware of the impact of the food production methods used on health and the environment, which translates into a dynamically growing interest in organic products. The main aim of this publication is to present, analyse and evaluate the behaviour of buyers in the organic market during the process of selection and purchase of products.Material and methodsThe research was conducted on a group of 566 respondents, including 330 young buyers coming from Poland and 236 from Belarus. A purposive selection method was used in the research. The research was comparative and enabled the identification and analysis of differences in the market behaviour of individual groups of buyers coming from Poland and Belarus. The buyers' behaviours were studied and analysed in relation to the decision-making process concerning the purchase of organic products, taking into account: product selection criteria and the place and frequency of purchase in different types of retail unitsResultsOn the basis of the research and analysis carried out, it can be observed that there are differences in the purchasing behaviour of buyers from Poland and Belarus. These are due, among other things, to differences in consumer awareness and perception of the benefits of consuming organic products. Factors related to the availability of organic food in organisational as well as economic terms are also important.ConclusionsThe obtained results and analyzes may contribute to understanding consumer behavior on the organic food market and be used for further in-depth research or help shape market strategies by sellers.

Research on Optimal Group-Purchase Threshold and Pricing Strategy of Community Group Purchase

This study delves into the rapidly evolving community group-buying model, specifically focusing on the determination of optimal group-buying thresholds and pricing strategies for merchants. Aiming to bridge the gap in the existing literature, the methodology employs optimization models, integrating a numerical analysis to construct and evaluate a single merchant model. The findings reveal a nuanced relationship: within a specific threshold interval, a unique group-purchase threshold exists where merchants can maximize profits by balancing group and ordinary sales. The study shows that factors like ordinary selling price, group-buying publicity, and associated costs significantly influence these thresholds and pricing strategies. A critical insight is the threshold’s variability in response to market conditions, highlighting a strategic balance for maximizing profitability. The research underscores the need for merchants to adapt their strategies in response to evolving market dynamics and consumer behaviors. However, the study acknowledges its limitations due to its theoretical nature and focus on the Chinese market, suggesting the potential for future empirical studies in diverse cultural and economic contexts. Overall, this research contributes both theoretically and practically by providing a foundational framework for merchants to optimize group-purchase thresholds and pricing strategies in the dynamic realm of community group buying.

Research on the Business Model of Pinduoduo Based on User Analysis

In today's digital age, e-commerce platforms have become an integral part of the business ecosystem. These platforms have redefined the traditional way of business transactions through innovative business models and user analysis methods, and have greatly influenced consumers' shopping experience and enterprises' business strategies. This paper aims to deeply explore the business model of an e-commerce platform based on user analysis by taking Pinduoduo as an example, to reveal the successful mechanism and operational points behind it. Analyzing Pinduoduo's business model and marketing strategy by literature review and case comparison methods, this article attributes Pinduoduo's business success to its adoption of social shopping, group buying, low-price goods, and user interaction. Additionally, this paper forecasts Pinduoduo's development prospects from the perspective of user experiences and social interaction. I hope to provide some theoretical support for future researchers.