Efficacy of Communication Support in Collaborative Online Shopping: The Moderating Effect of Task Types

With the widespread popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, social commerce is generating much hype in business and is attracting a lot of attention in academia. Social commerce integrates e-commerce and social communication/media. In this research, our focus is on collaborative online shopping. This research-in-progress paper outlines an experimental study to investigate the effect of communication support and task types on collaborative online shopping. Media Richness Theory (MRT) and Task-Media Fit (TMF) form the theoretical foundation of this research. As a pioneering research to investigate the interaction effect of communication support and task types in collaborative online shopping, we expect this research to contribute to a better understanding of the design and development of collaborative online shopping websites.