Application of the stimuli-organism-response framework to factors influencing social commerce intentions among social network users

Abstract

Social commerce is a new trend in e-commerce powered by social media. In this type of commerce, individuals share their knowledge, information, and experiences about different products and services. This paper employs the stimuli-organism-response model to investigate the factors affecting social commerce intentions among users of social networks a total of 514 persons on three favourite social networks in Iran (i.e., Telegram, Facebook and Cloob) were investigated. Analysis of the results applying the PLS-SEM approach disclosed that firstly website or application quality, perceived interactivity, and subjective norms act as stimuli to influence, relationship quality, social support, and attitudes toward social commerce as organisms, respectively; furthermore, the latter two organisms are also impacted by social commerce construct, which is a stimulus; and perceived interactivity impacts attitudes toward social support secondly social support, relationship quality, and social attitude as organisms together with subjective norms are positively associated with social commerce intention as the response; and finally social support has a significant positive impact on relationship quality which in turn influences attitudes toward social commerce.