Hello, everyone.
I am Chen Zhilong from Tsinghua University.
On behalf of all authors, I am here to introduce our work,
"Understanding the Role of Intermediaries
in Online Social E-commerce, an Exploratory Study of Beidian."
In recent years, an emerging form of social e-commerce
leverages existing real-world social relationships
to do marketing, and has achieved great success quickly
in China.
In these platforms, intermediaries
play a vital role.
As shown in the figure, these intermediaries share item
links and recommend items, bridging
the supply end of social e-commerce platforms
and the demand end of purchasers.
They make these sites distinctive
and shape the success of these platforms.
Therefore, in this work, we seem to understand firstly,
what do intermediaries do in the emerging
form of social e-commerce; and secondly,
why do some intermediaries stand out in a crowd?
To answer these questions, we conduct a mixed method study.
Quantitatively, we utilize the [INAUDIBLE] data from Beidian,
one of the leading social e-commerce platforms in China,
for data-driven investigation.
Qualitatively, we leverage the power
of forum study and interview study
to complement our data-driven approach,
with a special focus on intermediaries, actions,
and strategies.
In terms of the question, that what intermediaries do,
we find that, firstly, intermediaries
recommend products as local trend detectors.
Our data show that intermediaries'
future recommendations positively
correlate with their own past sales, as well
as the past deals in their sales community.
This is further corroborated by our qualitative study.
Intermediaries recurrently promote items that sell well.
Secondly, intermediaries serve customers as socially connected
grocery stores.
Intermediaries resemble convenience stores in the way
that they promote products from diverse categories.
While not many deals are made per person on average,
our qualitative study tells us that intermediaries sales
target socially connected ones, and thus socially connected
grocery stores are latched to.
We further investigated why some intermediaries stand out.
We clustered intermediaries into groups
based on their re-recommendation behaviors,
and correlated the clusters with their performances.
We discovered that intermediaries in cluster 4
are successful in customer number, [INAUDIBLE] number,
and total sales volume.
These intermediaries peak on a not long re-recommendation
interval with heavy tails.
Our qualitative study corroborates
that successful intermediaries intentionally
don't disturb potential customers much,
while they focus their dedication whenever
top sellers comes.
In terms of transaction modes, we
discover significant differences between sales
of successful intermediaries and the overall cases.
These successful intermediaries broadcast their sales
to a wider customer base, make more deals per customer,
and sell products of more diverse kinds.
The qualitative study shows that successful intermediaries admit
that adopting the mode of low unit price, small profits,
but quick turnovers is beneficial.
This indicates that being small scale generalists
makes more successful, socially connected grocery stores.
Therefore, in this paper, we demonstrate the power
of manual recommender system.
People have more background information
about potential customers, and a better understanding
of their interests and needs.
Commodities are proactively pushed directly
to potential customers, and this can make the recommendations
more effective.
What's more, a moderate amount and frequency
for recommendation is important for the success
of intermediaries, but promotion strategy
resembling convenience stores would be an applicable option.
Thanks for listening.