1 INTRODUCTION
Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce has experienced rapid growth in the past years. At the same time, second-hand market is booming. One could say that C2C e-commerce has become a new trend in the area of second-hand market.
Besides eBay, Craigslist and other social commerce platforms there is a great number of different buy-sell-swap groups in Facebook, and they have thousands of members in Finland alone. In the groups, people may spend plenty of time browsing through hundreds of sales posts of all kinds of items from utensils to furniture. Local sales groups gather together people from same neighborhoods and encourage local second-hand trading.
This research aims to shed light on second-hand consumer-to-consumer buying in Facebook buy-sell-swap groups. The main focus is in understanding and explaining what are the consumer attitudes towards second-hand C2C online buying and what motivates them to engage in such markets as buyers.
1.1 Background of the research
Flea markets are seemingly recent forms of exchange between buyers and sellers but they are much alike the oldest forms of exchange which took place outside of the house (Belk. et al., 1998, 457). Today, second-hand market has extended from conventional flea markets to the online environment. Chu (2013, 1527) proposes that the great number of sales in online auctions indicates that the whole consumer behavior has changed dramatically from the days of conventional buying. Liao and Chu (2013, 1576), state that consumer online resale is growing to be an everyday method of buying/selling items. However, it has been argued that there is quite a little research over the area of second-hand market in the first
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place (Sihvonen and Turunen, 2016). Yet, people are coming more and more interested in ecological aspects of their purchases and avoiding waste. It is no wonder why second-hand buying and selling are becoming a standard in people’s day to day lives.
At the same time, consumers have adopted online buying as an important channel to buy many kinds of products and services, and also second-hand online buying has increased. In this study, second-hand online buying is researched in the consumer to consumer (C2C) perspective. Consumer behavior is an area of research that has been studied widely. However, C2C online second-hand buying is an area that has not been studied much yet, and Chu (2013) argues that researchers does not know much about online reselling behavior.
According to Leonard (2012, 16), the research of C2C is still in the stage of infancy and there is yet a lot to be learned. Jones and Leonard (2009, 1) claim that C2C e-commerce is a mounting area of electronic e-commerce. Online reselling has increased massively in past years alongside with the increase of online and second-hand buying overall, and therefore it is a very interesting and current topic to be discovered more deeply.
Studying C2C second-hand market will give retailers useful information of the competing marketplace. It could be that the whole reselling business will be touched by C2C reselling since as Chu (2013, 1527) proposes: “More consumers nowadays are acting the role of reseller by taking advantage of online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction sites.” The results from the study will provide researchers and retailers greater knowledge of the consumer motivations for second-hand C2C online buying. The information can be useful especially for those retailers who are willing to broaden their business by starting to compete in the second-hand market.
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It was interesting to notice that in 2016 (meanwhile the thesis was written) there were also released many new academic articles concerning C2C social commerce and second-hand shopping motivations such as Chen et al. (2016), Ferraro et al.
(2016) and Sihvonen and Turunen (2016) just to name a few. Hence, it seem like in academic literature there has clearly been noted a great gap of research in the area of second-hand C2C markets recently and perhaps research in this area will increase plenty in the near future.
The currency and consumers’ huge interest in Facebook buy-sell-swap –groups in Finland could be spotted also in September 2016, when a Finnish Facebook-user wrote an ironic text on her personal Facebook page about the difficulty of creating a sell-post that have enough information for the buyers, and the difficulty to follow the rules of Facebook buy-sell-swap -groups. She created a “perfect” sell-post in order to sell a baby snapsuit for just two euros and tried to make the post so informative that no-one interested to buy the snapsuit could have any more questions about the product.
The text was overly long and ironic, and had information such as how many times the snapsuit had been washed and with which washing powder and fabric softener. The information also included breeds of her dogs and all crucial measures of the snapsuit all the way to the observation tower. In less than 24 hours, the text was shared (by other Facebook users) for more than 8600 times and many Facebook users had commented underneath the post about their personal difficulties of trading products in Facebook sales groups. The fact that the post spread so quickly around Finland had probably much to do with the fact that there were many people who had had similar experiences in those groups in the past. (Aamulehti no. 1)
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This study attempts to shed light on the very current and interesting phenomena of second-hand consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online market. The objective of the thesis is to understand and explain what are the consumer perceptions and attitudes towards second-hand C2C online buying in the context of Facebook buy-sell-swap groups. Consumer motivations towards second-hand C2C online buying and perceived positive and negative factors of Facebook sales groups will be studied as well. The research has been conducted for the reason that there was noted a research gap in the area of second-hand C2C online buying.
Figure 1. Research area