Sustainable social shopping system

Abstract

Shopping is one of the key activities that humans undertake that has an overwhelming influence on the economic, environmental, and health facets of their life and ultimately their sustainability. More recently social media has been used to connect vendors and consumers together to discover, share, recommend and transact goods and services. However there is a paucity of academic literature on sustainable social shopping as well as systems in industry to support the same. There is no single online shopping system that provides a holistic shopping experience to customers that allows them to balance financial, health, and environmental dimensions. To address this lacuna we propose Sustainable Social Shopping Systems as a means by which we can practically support individuals to become more sustainable and ultimately transform their lives. In this paper we propose and implement concepts, models, processes and a framework that are fundamental for the design of such systems.