Editorial 22/3
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EDITORIAL
Editorial 22/3 Rainer Alt & Karen Heyden & Hubert Österle
# Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen 2012
Dear readers of Electronic Markets, We are happy to present the first general research issue in 2012. It includes five contributions which investigate various aspects in customer interaction, an area receiving increased attention with the upcoming Social Media and mobile technologies. In fact, we observe that these innovations shape the picture of the ‘empowered’ customer who has the opportunity to obtain information from a variety of sources via multiple channels. The ability to compare between providers has been recognized as a key characteristic of electronic markets and acknowledged to shift negotiation power towards the buyer. We believe that this revolution is only at the beginning and we will see profound changes in many industries driven by the emerging consumer-oriented solutions. Some insights towards a deeper understanding of online consumer behavior are included in this issue’s research articles. The first presents a framework for mining product reviews that customers post on electronic commerce sites. Using a combination of text mining and econometrics the authors Weijia You, Mu Xia, Lu Liu and Dan Liu suggest an automated approach to extract knowledge on customer satisfaction from online communities. Their paper on “Customer knowledge discovery from online reviews” shows the application of R. Alt (*) : K. Heyden University of Leipzig, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] K. Heyden e-mail: [email protected] H. Österle University of St. Gallen, Müller-Friedberg-Str 8, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
this solution with a Chinese online store and how insights on product features as well as on customer satisfaction were efficiently obtained from these reviews. A second contribution towards understanding customer behavior in electronic commerce environments is offered in the paper titled “Mood and social presence on customer purchase behavior in C2C e-commerce Chinese cultures”. In particular, the authors Hanpeng Zhang, Yong Lu, Xiaoli Shi, Zongming Tang and Zhijian Zhao discuss the influence of mood and social presence on consumer purchases in Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) e-commerce in China. They report that the overall mood has a positive influence on purchase decisions and provide some insights on how it may be influenced. A major factor is solutions which increase the feeling of social presence and create a “warm” environment, such as virtual communities, forums or chats. Further factors reported in the paper are individualization and customization of offerings and communication. An established means for customers to express their opinion are rating systems. As shown in the third contribution by Xianfeng Zhang, Jifeng Luo and Qi Li various rating systems exist which provide a reliable and consistent way for customers to express their satisfaction with a product and/or seller. Their resea
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