Community Commerce: Facilitating Trust in Mom-to-Mom Sale Groups on Facebook

Consumers are turning to Facebook Groups to buy and sell with strangers in their local communities. This trend is counter-intuitive given Facebook's lack of conventional e-commerce features, such as sophisticated search engines and reputation systems. We interviewed 18 members of two Mom-to-Mom Facebook sale groups. Despite a lack of commerce tools, members perceived sale groups as an easy-to-use way to quickly and conveniently buy and sell. Most important to members was that the groups felt safe and trustworthy. Drawing on these insights, we contribute a novel framing, community commerce, which explains the trust mechanisms that enable transactions between strangers in some groups. Community commerce fosters trust through (a) exclusive membership to a closed group, (b) regulation and sanctioning of behavior at the admin, member, and group level, and (c) a shared group identity or perceived similarity (though, surprisingly, not through social bonding). We discuss how community commerce affords unique and sometimes superior trust assurances and propose design implications for platforms hoping to foster trust between members who buy, sell, or share amongst themselves.