Research On Business Model And Consumer Network Of Group Buying

Innovation can drive companies to develop further, it can also make companies still compete in the fierce competition market by keeping their competitive advantage above their competition. Following the development of e-commerce in the world, there are more and more new business models within the e-business environment. The Group buying phenomenon has become the focus of e-business in international economic environment. Group buying websites is one of the styles of international economic era innovation because of the special advantages on its operational mechanism. The benefit of group buying website for consumers include money saving, promoting customer interaction, information and knowledge sharing. At the same time, the benefits for sellers in group buying websites include decrease transaction cost and production cost. Therefore, if a company wants to keep exist within this attractive industry they need to keep adjusting their operational mechanism in order to retain their competitive advantage by using the power of consumer network reasonably.This article will first review all the past related articles about group buying business model and consumer interaction.then arranging the operational mechanism theory of group buying websites, and combining social network theory and consumer interaction theory to set up a customer network interaction model. In the end, this article will choose two different types of group buying websites to analyze their operational mechanism in order to explore how do they use the consumer network. This will be done by first arranging the theories, setting up models, and finally case study to show the value of group buying.The whole article is separated into five parts. The first one is introduction, it describe the research background, research valuation, literature review, research method and framework. The second part will show reasons how group buying become a phenomenon and its recent developments. This will be done from four point of view, which is consumer, seller, the websites owner, and government. This article will also explore the classification and also the problems of group buying. The main part of this article is the third part. First It will show the analysis of the operation mechanism of group buying from two point of view, the operational mechanism of the whole industry and the operational mechanism of the two different group buying websites. Second. it will define consumer network, finding out how it become popular, setting up consumer network interaction model and discuss about the characters of consumer network. The fourth part will be case study. This article chose two different types of group buying website. The first one is from international website which focusing on service industry, the second one is a local website which focusing on trade goods. Based the analysis of these two websites operational mechanism and the use of consumer network, this article will compare these two cases. At the end, this article will give conclusion about the research result and point out the innovation point and limitation point and further research possibilities.