Computer Science Department
An e-Commerce Website that Leverages the Power of Social Media
This project involves developing an electronic commerce website that leverages the power of social media to facilitate consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales and marketing.
As an e-commerce website, it provides basic functionalities to allow people and business to sell and buy a broad variety of goods and services, including product upload and viewing and online transaction.
The website shares some similarities with Amazon.com and Groupon.com, but differs in the following three ways. Firstly, it emphasizes interpersonal marketing. While most internet-based shopping websites market sellers' products via banner ads, sidebar ads and pop-up ads, this website focuses on assisting sellers in advertising through social media. For every product listed on the website, there is a variety of social networking links for both sellers and buyers to spread the product information and invite their friends to group purchase the product. Secondly, the price of each product depends on the quantity of buyers. As the website helps sellers save their marketing expense via the use of social media marketing and the product selling is based on group purchase, sellers have a wide flexibility to adjust the price of their products. Unlike Groupon.com that offers consumers a fixed discount on every deal, the price of each product on this website will vary as the number of buyer changes. Every time the quantity of buyer breaks a pre-set threshold, there will be a new discount. By this way, buyers will be highly motivated to share the product information with their friends on social media. And finally, unlike Amazon.com that charges commission based on selling price, the commission that the website charges its sellers will be determined by the quantity of product sold.