Hello, everyone! I am Zhilong Chen from Tsinghua University.
On behalf of all authors, I am here to introduce our work,
Beyond Virtual Bazaar: How Social Commerce Promotes Inclusivity for the Traditionally
Underserved Community in Chinese Developing Regions.
The disadvantaged population has long been identified as underserved and marginalized
in technology engagement by HCI4D and ICTD communities.
As indicated by prior literature, they are generally more reluctant
and experience more barriers in adopting and engaging with mainstream technology.
Social commerce presents a novel counter case which first prospers in development regions such
as small towns and villages in China before adopted by the population in large cities.
It has been heavily used and engaged by the traditionally underserved community
with a high retention rate.
This platform has also achieved great business success.
For example, the social commerce giant of Pinduodo has become the second largest e-commerce platform
in China and has attained gross merchandise volume of tens of millions of dollars.
How is this achieved?
Here, we seek to investigate how the design of social commerce helps engage the traditionally
underserved population and explore the reasons behind its technology inclusivity.
Specifically, we ask the following research questions:
How does the traditionally underserved community in Chinese developing regions
engage in social commerce? How do they adopt social commerce,
make purchases, and interact with others on the platforms?
How do characteristics of social commerce situate with the community and promote inclusivity?
To answer them, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 12 participants
from the traditionally underserved community in Chinese development regions
who engage with social commerce in recent years.
We find that their adoption of social commerce platforms
is strongly influenced by their strong ties.
In terms of getting to know the platforms, they mainly rely on introduction from strong ties.
When they get to use the platforms, peer usages lend them confidence in
their digital competence of mastering the platforms and the help from strong ties
effectively situates their difficulties and lends them confidence of their competence to master the
operations on the platforms especially when compared to official guidelines.
This social reliance on strong ties exactly resembles bazaars.
From the perspective of items for purchases, social commerce proves
to be a kind of virtual bazaar for daily purchases as reflected by our participants.
Cost-efficient daily necessities and miscellaneous schools take up the vast
majority of their purchases and most of these purchases come from different small online shops.
This again aligns well with the characteristics of bazaars.
What's more, beyond bazaars, social commerce further enables our participants
to approach products that they would not get or even know from the local.
These aforementioned characteristics as a whole create an atmosphere that the
community is familiar with and greatly appeal to the community consequently.
In terms of purchase behaviors, social commerce
also demonstrates practices similar to offline bazaars.
As in offline bazaars, practices of searching, clientelization, bargain,
and testing are functioning in different forms in the digital space of social commerce.
For example, as for searching, friends' recommendations are leveraged
to reduce information load and make effective searching.
As for clientelization, the diversity of purchase choices on social commerce narrows
customer-seller connections, but similar forms of clientelization emerge on the platform level.
As for bargain, social commerce introduces a new kind of bargain feature
that is similar in aims and efforts but different in detailed forms.
As for testing, although the physical segregation lay foundational constraints, they can refer to
friends' testing experiences and test upon arrival empowered by the effective after-sale services.
Furthermore, social commerce enables social interactions shaped by Chinese socio-cultural
norms, which further facilitates the community's willingness to engage.
For example, it suits the collectivist culture, allows convenient sharing,
and helps maintain interactions among strong ties and cultivate the sense of togetherness.
It helps maintain mianzi by demonstrating the ability to make good use of time,
cost-efficiently achieve utility, and earn prestige and recognition in a penny-wise way.
The Chinese concepts of guanxi and renqing are also reflected
in the social interactions in social commerce.
Because rewards are designed to be one-way,
participants utilize guanxi to determine the audience for help, rely mostly on strong ties,
and use their social capital backed by guanxi in exchange for economic benefits.
And when they owe others a renqing or favor in such requests or favor-asking,
they try to pay it back and emphasize mutuality and reciprocity.
Based on these findings, we discuss how social commerce relates to bazaars that
people in the traditionally underserved community in Chinese development regions are familiar with.
It resembles bazaars in adoption,
products, and the incorporation of practices of searching, clientelization, bargain, and testing.
Beyond this, it enables novel collaborative social interactions
that fit the social, cultural, and economic context of the community.
We highlight the necessity of suiting the appetites of the community
and resembling what the community is familiar with.
We situate into existing literature to discuss the novelty of bringing upon
a novel Chinese case for HCI4D.
We further discuss the design implications for designers and practitioners
to build more inclusive applications for the traditionally underserved community:
to take advantage of established habits and infrastructure,
to leverage peer influence,
to use appropriate metaphors that people can understand from their prior experiences,
and to incorporate incentives that suit the community's social,
cultural, and economic context.
Moreover, the limitations and future works of our study are discussed.
Thanks for listening!