Enhancing the parasocial interaction relationship between consumers through similarity effects in the context of social commerce

Abstract

With the combination of social media and e-commerce, consumers usually gather all kind of available information for making their final purchase decisions online. From the perspective of interpersonal interaction, we proposed similarity (including external similarity and internal similarity) is an important peripheral informational processing route for consumers to make decisions. Built on the theories of similarity extrapolation, trust transfer and parasocial interaction (PSI), we examined whether similarity could enhance PSI relationship between consumers and the intention to do the social shopping and social sharing. The findings of PLS analysis in this study demonstrated that both external similarity and internal similarity significantly affected consumers’ PSI relationship forming and trust transfer, which in turn exerted profound impacts on consumers’ social commerce behaviors.