The user need for social interaction while using online sales configurators: towards the development of a measure

Mass customizers are connecting their configurators with social software applications (SocSW). SocSW are web-based applications that support internet users in social networking. Connections between configurators and SocSW support configurator users in social interacting, thus in getting much more feedback during their configuration process. Even the importance of feedback is recognised in mass customization literature, it’s still missing a measures to assess the strength of this need across configurators users. To narrow this gap, the present paper presents an exploratory analysis to detect the various facets of social interaction and subsequently proposes some suggestions for the development of multi-item measure of the need for feedback during the configuration experience.