Resumen de The role of location information sharing in e-service encounters on Mercado Libre*
María Elena Placencia, Hebe Powell
Mercado Libre (ML) is the largest platform for e-commerce in Latin America. Off-line location information is embedded in the way the company operates: it has many country-specific sites, which also provide users with a choice of administrative area (e.g., a province) for their transactions. These off-line locations allow users to orient themselves before attempting a transaction.An important feature of ML is that it offers users a publicly available space where buyers can post questions and receive answers from sellers about a given product. This space is also where more detailed buyer/seller location information may be shared. Such information can influence how an interaction develops and thus, the success of the transaction; it also has the potential to transform the e-service encounter into a hybrid encounter. Building on work on (mobile) telephony location talk and technology-mediated communication more widely, in this chapter, we examine the role of location information sharing in ML interactions, based on corpora obtained from ML-Argentina, ML-Ecuador and ML-Mexico. While we found some parallels with the use of location talk in mobile phone conversations, we also encountered some important differences.
