Dr Anita Greenhill makes a presentation about Blogshops

Dr Anita Greenhill (a co-author of the first known academic paper on blogshops, available here) presented a lecture on her work on the Singapore Blogshop at the American University of Beirut recently.  The following is a write up of the event from the AUB website:

From: http://alignwithosb.com/2010/06/anita-greenhill-blogshops/

Blogshops: Singaporean Youth’s e-Commerce Model

June 15, 2010 by Bilal Malaeb ·

Dr. Anita Greenhill of the Manchester University Business School recently gave a lecture on “Blogshops: Technology and Social Networking in e-Commerce.”  Dr. Greenhill’s research interests include digital cultural practices, space, virtuality, technology fairness and equity, and e-Government and governance. She presented on blogshops in Singapore in which female teens use technology, particularly blogs, to manage retail and take advantage of e-commerce.



In order to maximize consumption and purchasing power, young Singaporean girls use blogs to sell used goods or items they had originally purchased, but did not use. These blogs are a perfect example of marketing, as they are highly visually oriented and utilize pictures from mobile phones or graphics from websites or other blogs to feature items.

“What are blogshops?” Greenhill asked. These are pages on host websites, typically www.blogspot.com, and used by females between the ages of 13 to 25, and are widespread in Singapore. In her study, Greenhill sought to study the demography of the process to see if it can be replicated elsewhere. The blogshops tend to market fashion items, and the sellers determine their own rules for merchandising their products; claims such as “If the goods bear any defects or do not look like their photos, I am not responsible,” are quite common. Some sellers also charge fines to their buyers if the buyer is late to their meeting. Meet-ups among the sellers are an obvious networking phenomenon of the process, and represent a cultural component of the business that deviates from traditional meet-ups in which teenagers would otherwise meet up to gossip or discuss the latest fashions.

Greenhill described women’s shopping behavior as determined and irrational. “Women over-purchase, and when they are calm and out of the consumption mode, they find that some of the goods are useless and quite redundant.” Thus, these female teenagers use the web to sell clothing or accessories that they found, after their shopping high, to be useless. The selling of these extras is entrepreneurial in its focus and uses technology to resist capitalist hegemonies. The blogshops business has no budget or investment, and so it is accessible to the masses. On a social level, according to Greenhill, this is a grassroots project which acts as a political form of resistance or participation. Their expertise is local and particular to Singapore. Notably, the youngest female seller that has used the interface was aged twelve, suggesting that the population is becoming more accessible to younger age groups.

Greenhill says that the girls take no responsibility over any defect in the items they sell.

 An example of the highly-visual, graphical blogshops.

For transportation, the sellers utilize the metro system, which is complex and well-organized in Singapore, and therefore increases the sellers’ efficiency. Singaporean female teenagers also make use of social contexts to complete their transactions, as their business practices typically occur without their parents’ knowledge. For instance, some take advantage of paying visits to grandparents, whereby, they would deviate to make a quick transaction in the metro station and then continue their route.

However, the process bears some disadvantages. There is absolutely no privacy involved, and a huge amount of trust is required. “I would not feel comfortable having my twelve-year-old daughter go unwatched with money or goods to some far place in the city to buy or sell items, with all blog users aware of her destination and transaction,” said Greenhill. Moreover, the government of Singapore does not encourage the process because it does not make a profit from the transactions because no taxes or records are involved in the trade.
Though blogshops have their disadvantages in terms of safety, privacy, and trust, the blogshops are truly inspiring as an alternative model of community e-commerce and are admirable as an entrepreneurial initiative for their profit maximization and utility optimization.