AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE USAGE OF SOCIAL
MEDIA IN GERMAN B2C-ONLINE STORES
International Journal of Advanced Information Technology (IJAIT), 3 (5):
01-14 (October 2013)DOI: 10.5121/ijait.2013.3501
Abstract
Customers in electronic commerce (e-commerce) are shifting more and more from content consumers to
content producers. Social media features (like customer reviews) allow and encourage user interaction in
online stores. An interesting question is, which social media features are actually provided by online stores
to support user interaction. We contribute knowledge to this question, by studying the social media features
of the 115 highest-grossing German B2C-online stores from the years 2010 and 2011. We categorize the
results of the observational study into the seven building blocks of social media to understand what areas
of social media are used the most in these online stores. The results of our study show, that the average
online store implements about five social media features and that the majority of the features are placed on
product pages. The most common features were customer reviews and ratings and the sharing and liking of
product details.