E-commerce transactions in a virtual environment: Virtual transactions

Scarle, Simon; Arnab, Sylvester; Dunwell, Ian; Petridis, Panagiotis; Protopsaltis, Aristidis; de Freitas, Sara

Abstract

E-commerce is a fundamental method of doing business, such that for a firm to say it is trading at all in the modern market-place it must have some element of on-line presence. Coupled with this is the explosion of the "population" of Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games and other shared virtual environments. Many suggest this will lead to a further dimension of commerce: virtual commerce. We discuss here the issues, current roadblocks and present state of an e-commerce transaction carried out completely within a virtual environment; a virtual transaction. Although technically such transactions are in a sense trivial, they raise many other issues in complex ways thus making V-transactions a highly interesting cross-disciplinary issue. We also discuss the social, ethical and regulatory implications for the virtual communities in these environments of such v-transactions, how their implementation affects the nature and management of a virtual environment, and how they represent a fundamental merging of the real and virtual worlds for the purpose of commerce. We highlight the minimal set of features a v-transaction capable virtual environment requires and suggest a model of how in the medium term they could be carried out via a methodology we call click-through, and that the developers of such environments will need to take on the multi-modal behavior of their users, as well as elements of the economic and political sciences in order to fully realize the commercial potential of the v-transaction. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Oct 3, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2019
• Journal: Electronic Commerce Research
• Print ISSN: 1389-5753
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-9362
• Publisher: Springer (part of Springer Nature)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 379-407
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-012-9098-4
• Keywords: electronic commerce, e-commerce, virtual environments, ; virtual worlds, metaverses
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/944575
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10660-012-9098-4