Supporting the social dimension of shopping for personalized products through online sales configurators

Mass customizers often sell personalized products through online sales configurators, also known as mass-customization toolkits. Recently, a number of mass customizers have connected their sales configurators with social software applications. This is not surprising, as social software enables an interactive and socially rich shopping experience, which makes shopping with a mass-customization toolkit more similar to retail shopping. However, research on the use of social software by mass customizers is very limited: almost all previous studies on mass-customization toolkits have focused on the dyadic interaction between a sales configurator and an isolated, potential customer. Based on an analysis of 277 real online sales configurators, the present paper identifies eight different ways in which online sales configurators can connect with social software. These different connection modalities are compared both in terms of enabled social interactions and in terms of support provided for the sales configuration task. The paper also shows that, in the analyzed sample, the level of adoption varies substantially across the different modalities and, for the same modality, across industries. A number of opportunities for future research on these sales configurator-social software connection modalities are finally outlined.