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As competition in B2C e-commerce becomes more fierce, online stores have made efforts to attract consumer attention by adopting state-of-the-art technologies. Specifically, virtual reality (VR) has recently been gaining prominence on the Internet because it enables consumers to experience products over the web, an activity that plays a key role in obviating consumers' lack of real physical contact with products. VR simulates direct experiences in mediated environments, and it can generate a compelling sense of telepresence.The present study proposes a research model to analyse and evaluate the impact of telepresence on consumer perception, based on existing theories of telepresence and consumer learning. A laboratory experiment with three user interfaces -multiple pictures, video clips and VR -has been conducted to test the model. The VR interface produced the highest level of telepresence, as expected. Telepresence in turn generally augments consumers' product knowledge, attitudes and purchase intentions, and reduces consumer perceptions of product risk and discrepancies between online product information and actual products, directly or indirectly.

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The purpose of this study is to find the factors that enhance member participation in business-to-customer virtual communities. Although there are many factors influencing member participation, this study limits its independent variables to those of managing strategy and information system quality. In addition to finding their direct impacts, this study identifies indirect effects through two mediating variables such as member visit and sense of community. The result of this study revealed that there was no significant direct path from managing strategy to participation. However, the path from sense of community to participation was strongly supported by the results. This then implies that a manager of a community has to emphasize the sense of community, membership in particular, in order to enhance participation. In addition, the results showed that sense of community could be enhanced by an appropriate managing strategy, while the number of visits could be increased by the information system's quality.

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