“Buy, sell and trade”: consumption in informal trade groups in virtual social networks

Abstract

The ease of access and interaction from web 2.0 has potentiated the advance of new forms of commercial transactions in the virtual environment, mainly from the emergence of groups of purchases, sales and exchanges in virtual social networks. The objective of this research is to verify aspects of this new consumer behavior in the groups of commercial transactions between consumers (consumer-to-consumer). To do so, a data collection from the survey method was performed by online questionnaire, with 354 respondents from 22 federative units in Brazil. The analysis was made using descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing. The results showed that there are significant divergences regarding the profile of C2C consumers in social networks with respect to gender, age group and educational level, when compared to the online consumer profile described in the literature. However, no significant divergences were identified in variables that influence purchase decisions, such as price, variety of products, quality, payment terms, deadlines and security, for example, among sample cuts made, thus revealing that this kind of trade can be a window of new business opportunities.