A social recommender mechanism for location-based group commerce

With the rapid growth of social media platforms, numerous group commerce websites, which exploit both the advantages of price discounts and experience value, have emerged. Moreover, the popularity of sophisticated mobile devices brings great commercial opportunities for local store to gain publicity. In this research, considering user preference, geographic convenience, and friends' influence, a group-coupon recommender system is proposed for promoting location-sensitive products. The results of experiments conducted on Facebook indicate that the proposed mechanism could accurately recommend products and satisfactorily provide a companion list of to customers, significantly increasing willingness to purchase by taking advantage of the power of social influence. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.