Organizational group shopping in the cyber mall

Abstract

With the commercialization of the Internet, electronic commerce is expanding rapidly. Although most of shopping behavior in the real world is group shopping type which involves two or more people coming to shop together, most of cyber shopping malls don``t support group shopping. Group Shopping in cyber mall is necessary when two or more customers who are geographically apart from one another want to buy products collaboratively viewing the same web screens in the cyber shopping mall site. In this thesis, we study on Group Shopping System which support group purchasing decision as a specific groupware tool. First, we suggest the technology-dependent stages of Group Shopping System which electronic commerce integrated with groupware technologies. Then we analyze the required functions for Group Shopping System at current stage such as group management, communication management, initiative management, display management, alternative list management and purchase order management. We describe each function and its implementation and illustrate a prototype of the Group Shopping System.