Today's electronic malls don't support simultaneous communication and shopping. Here communication with other market participants provides an efficient way of gathering the missing information. Dialogs in parallel to shopping are not supported by existing electronic malls. However, these activities need to be coordinated most of the time to remain effective. In electronic markets there is no support of coordination yet.
Shared experience is common for traditional markets.
The client interfaces of today's electronic markets are designed for single users. The design of a Client Server Architecture became the conceptual basis for the development of a demonstrator. In addition to just browsing the market, the customer can use group interaction for communication in order to get information needed to make a decision in an efficient and convenient way. Additionally, interaction support increases the attractivity of a market and serves as a competitive incentive for visiting the group enabled market. The same arguments hold true when we enable groups to interact with each other.