An Empirical Study on the Impact of Social Presence on Customer Citizenship Behavior in E-business

Abstract

Under the B2C online shopping environment, the lack of social reality inhibits customer behavior, which triggers a need for enhancing social presence. Due to the rapid development of B2C e-business, customer behavior has extended to customer citizenship behavior. It remains unclear whether and how social presence influences customer citizenship behavior. We construct a theoretical model about the impact mechanism, which introduces customer trust and customer attitude as mediating variables. 289 questionnaires are collected from the customers who shop online frequently. The research results indicate that awareness and cognitive social presence have significant effects on customer citizenship behaviors such as recommendation, feedback and helping behavior. The specific mediating effect of customer trust is also significant. These findings point out that e-business platforms are supposed to deepen the degree of social presence to stimulate customer citizenship behavior.