【正文】 and design pathways across channels to help its customers get what they need at each stage of the buying process. IGP is one of the channels that Internet consumers could opt in to take advantage of superior values that may not be available from a regular channel. In short, knowledge of IGP can help panies design better services for potential customers. The third and somewhat surprising reason for social buying is that the whole group buying phenomenon has emerged dynamically from parts of the world outside the West, and the phenomenon is experiencing a reverse migration to the West. This gives social buying a wide spread acceptance that few innovations enjoy. The basic push for group buying has e from China where it is better known as “Tuangou” [Farrrar 2009, Zhang 2010]. Tuangou or group buying has really taken off in China, spreading through China like “wildfire” [Economist 2006, p. 59]. According to Zhang [2010], by September 2010, there was over 1,000 online group buy websites in China and sales had reached one billion Yuan (Chinese RMB, equal to USD$ 15 million). In recent years the group buying phenomenon has spread through the West also. For example, , an online vendor founded in 2008, has been phenomenally successful in promoting group buying in the US. Groupon and similar websites offer deals to its members if they promise to signup for cert。 Nunes amp。 Van Bruggen 2005]. There is a strong justification for this because customers using multiple channels spend two to four times as much as customers using a single channel [Kumar amp。 Johnson 2007。 Nunes amp。 Porter 2001]. Before the Internet, consumers typically relied on only one type of channel for goods。 Nunes amp。 Tjan 2008。 they may even join the brand munity. With the advent of this new consumer decision process, it is very likely that Internet vendors should adopt different marketing strategies for creating initial sales and generating repeat sales. Unfortunately they are not knowledgeable about how to employ social media marketing methods to develop networked munication forums that govern the expression, transmission, and reception of a message [Dutta 2010]. One of our study goals, therefore, is to remedy this gap in knowledge. Yet even as modes of group buying are mushrooming, there is very little academic literature on social buying. To our knowledge no academic paper so far has tried to understand how these groups form, how they are organized, how they are managed. None has examined the internal negotiations that go on within these groups. This lack of research is ironic in that there are many reasons why consumers should be fascinated by social buying. In addition to the reasons articulated above, a second reason that favors it is that today’s consumers are not fettered by traditional channels of distribution [Black et al. 2002。 if they are convinced by the reviews and information, they will next go on to purchase the product or service。 Edelman 2010]. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, political group website, brand munities, and other social networking websites provide ample opportunity for consumers to municate and share experiences, opinions, knowledge and attitudes towards products and services [Kozinets et al. 2010]. Indeed, we would argue that marketers can be more successful when leveraging social media and benefiting from free contributions of time and effort by consumers and nonconsumers alike [Cook 2008]. Through the Internet, consumers seek products that are liked by other people in their social networks, provide reviews on products and services to help their fellow users in making decisions, share product use knowledge with new users, and express support for preferred brands. Not only do people share preferences, they also like to evaluate products with their friends and in the case of IGP even purchase products together.Since potential Internet customers possess different amounts of information and use different criteria for making purchase decisions [Kim amp。 Yang et al. 2010]. In particular, group purchasing, also called “group buy”, “team buy” or “collective purchase,” deals with group decisions by a group of individual consumers, sometimes who are even strangers [Economist 2006]. It occurs when consumers with similar goals and/or interests voluntarily bine their spending power to negotiate better prices from businesses. Reasons for consumers to group buy include splitting highly priced items, pooling money for birthday gifts, real estate, parties, buying a product in bulk to save money, raising money for a personal project from friends, collecting dues ahead of time and eliminating excuses and avoiding getting stuck covering costs when someone in the group does not pay. With the boom of the Internet, consumers have begun to collaborate online to purchase in groups, a process which we call Internet Group Purchasing (IGP hereafter). First, the relevant and relative advantages of the Internet as a medium have boosted the purchase of consumer goods. Second, the rapid spread of social media has paved the way for IGPs by providing the opportunity and tools to all consumers to easily express themselves and to inexpensively municate with one another. Wei et al.: The Power of Many Page 20There are at least three reasons for studying the IGP phenomenon and its management. First, IGP is a product of the age of social media, a revolution that is transforming consumer purchases from individual buying to social buying. Emerce has been ing of age for 20 years and has experienced two phases in its development [Brodie et al. 2007]. While the first phase was all about individual choices and better value for consumers, the second phase of Internet merce is being redefined by the social media revolution of the last decade [Barwise amp。附 錄參考文獻(xiàn) [1] 吳鍵安．市場營銷學(xué)［M］．北京：高等教育出版社，2007．[2] [J].(7). [3] 李崢嶸:論國內(nèi)門戶網(wǎng)站的發(fā)展戰(zhàn)略[D].西南交通大學(xué)碩士論文2002 [4] 郭令文．［D］．濟(jì)南：山東大學(xué)，2