A social referral appraising mechanism for the e-marketplace

With the popularity of social media, in order to achieve word-of-mouth marketing, many marketers and individual sellers are actively engaged in achieving positive ratings in the e-marketplace. Although many seller review mechanisms have been developed, e-commerce market operators and consumers still face trust fraud issues. Trust is one of the major issues that confuse online purchase activities. In this paper, we develop a social referral mechanism to verify sellers based on the experiences of friends within a buyer's social network. The proposed framework estimates the trust values of sellers from the perspective of the social network in order to stop buyers from making transactions with fraudulent sellers in the online marketplace.