A Social Referral Mechanism on e-Marketplace

With the popularity of social media, in order to achieve the word-of-mouth marketing, many marketers and individual sellers are actively engaged in getting positive ratings on e-marketplace. Although there are many seller review mechanisms developed, the electronic commerce market operators and the consumers are still facing the trust fraud challenge. Trust is one of major issues that baffle online purchase activities. In this paper, we develop a seller referral mechanism to verify sellers based on the experience of friends within a buyer's social network. The proposed framework estimates trust values of sellers from the perspective of social network for helping buyers prevent making transactions with the fraudulent sellers in the online marketplace.