Enhancing users’ digital social interactions while shopping via online sales configurators

The increasing innovation of interactive features enabled by Web technologies allows users of online platforms to carry out professional and personal activities with ever-increasing levels of digital social interaction. While Web users are familiar with the constant evolution of digital technologies, in contrast, companies with online platforms, including e-commerce, seem to lag behind compared to the increasing pace of digital evolution. The different speed of adaptability to digital evolution can engender a gap between customers’ requirements, in terms of user experience via online platforms, and companies’ ability to satisfy them properly. To avoid the risk of a growing gap with their customers (actual or potential), companies face at least the following two challenges. First, to speed up their abilities to adapt to Web-technology innovations, and second, to redesign their online platforms to deliver engaging user/customer experience enhanced with ever-increasing social interactive features. The present study seeks to further the debate on customer engagement in the online Mass Customization process by focusing on users’ experience via online sales configurators (OSCs) as Web-based software applications that support potential customers in purchasing self-design products. The aim of the present study is to design a representation of a Web-based feature to give users of OSCs the power to share their shopping experience with whom they prefer to invite during the journey of product personalization. The proposed feature aims at engaging potential customers by reproducing social interactions and recommendations that characterize shopping in retail with friends. To this end, the feature would enable OSC users in selecting who to invite to collect highly trustworthy social recommendations in addition to those provided by the system to support their decision-making. The bases of the feature are the likelihood that providing users with the opportunity to select one or more trustworthy shopping advisors while the product configuration is ongoing would simplify their purchase decision-making while making the product self-design highly engaging. Furthermore, on customers’ perspective, the feature may engage OSCs users in a personalization process not limited to the final product but extended to the overall shopping experience.