The success of e-commerce II

Nowadays, Amazon is no longer an online bookshop but has extended a wide range of products for sale. In fact, the online community approach has made it very successful to grow in the market. Otterbacher (2009) illustrated why the online community design (the “helpfulness” method of social navigation) makes Amazon so successful.

What is the “helpfulness” method of social navigation?

Online communities displaying textual postings require measures to combat information overload. One popular approach is to ask participants whether or not messages are helpful in order to then guide others to interesting content. Adopting a well-established framework for assessing data quality, we examine the nature of “helpfulness” (Otterbacher 2009, p. 955).

Amazon’s community has successfully adopted this methodology in its design. Participants post their quality book reviews which are rated by other participants in terms of helpfulness. Therefore, participants can select the book reviews based on the rating. As we all know that at the information era, we are flooded with information. This design can help participants to get the quality information.

Besides, the search engine of Amazon is very powerful and user friendly, I use it to locate the book I need. The price comparison model is also useful for users to see the differences among the commodities.

I myself have bought a few books and DVDs through Amazon. My experience is very positive. I can actually chase the shipments of my products and view my purchase from account. Like other online shops, I settle the payment by credit card.

Reference

Otterbacher, J 2009, ‘“Helpfulness” in Online Communities: A Measure of Message Quality’, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, Boston, MA USA, pp. 955-964.