(Dis)embedded Place-Making via Mobile Purchasing

This chapter begins with a daigou practitioner’s story of shifts in purchasing procedures, based on my three years of participatory observations. The story implies that daigou practitioners are aware of the place-based characteristics of their purchasing practices, and they adjust their business targets and online–offline communicative patterns in practice. How do the purchasing practices of daigou and settings of shopping places in HK interreact? The next two sections compare the real-time procedures of mobile communication at two shopping sites (i.e., TST and SS). This chapter argues that different levels of embeddedness of daigou businesses contribute to the different relations of shops (either vertical or horizontal), patterns of online-offline micro-coordination, and business scope.