Exploring the effects of extrinsic motivation on consumer behaviors in social commerce: Revealing consumers’ perceptions of social commerce benefits

Abstract

The rise of social media has created a new e-commerce platform called social commerce. In social commerce, e-vendors such as Amazon may integrate social media with their traditional e-commerce sites. Based on self-determination theory and social commerce literature, we develop a model illustrating how social commerce features may impact consumer behaviors and facilitate social commerce benefits from the extrinsic motivation perspective. We identify four types of extrinsic motivation including external motivation, introjected motivation, identified motivation, and integrated motivation; and we examine their influences on consumers’ intention to contribute social commerce information, which in turn leads to their subsequent behaviors and increases the perceived benefit of social commerce. We also consider the moderating effect of gender in the formulation of social commerce benefits. Based on longitudinal survey data from Amazon consumers, we find that 1) consumers’ external and identified motivation has a positive impact on intention to contribute social commerce information; 2) consumers’ intention is positively associated with their future behaviors, which in turn facilitate their perceptions of social commerce benefits; and 3) gender moderates the impact of behavior on social commerce benefits.