Abstract
Purpose The popularity of social networks has created business opportunities to the electronic commerce environment, being recently named as social commerce. The purpose of this paper is to analyze – from the perspective of the consumer – the main factors and characteristics (personal or related to the products bought) that have influenced consumers to participate in social commerce buying, recommending, comparing and sharing information about products and services in online marketplace and communities. Design/methodology/approach The study is characterized as an exploratory descriptive research, operationalized through a survey, applied to 229 participants of the social network Facebook. The research involves a qualitative stage for identifying potential variables that influence the participation of consumers in social commerce, followed by a quantitative one, including data collection procedures, validation and data analysis. Findings The results show trust, perceived usefulness and information quality as the factors that most influence consumer participation in social commerce, being trust in the website the main predictor. Concerning the characteristics, the findings also show that more expensive products and products classified as computers and electronics use ratings, recommendations and comments online more intensively than books, travel, household appliances and fashion products. Research limitations/implications As limitations of the study, the authors highlight the small number of interviews conducted during the qualitative stage, which may have left out other relevant factors of the analysis on consumers’ participation in social commerce. Another limitation refers to the selection of the participants of the study; all members of the social network Facebook are identified by the contact net of the authors – though it has been tried to enlarge this contact list by requesting the respondents to share the questionnaire link with their acquaintances, we should be cautious about the generalization of the results. Originality/value The study proposes an instrument to identify factors and characteristics that are taken into consideration by the consumers when participating in social commerce. Such a tool can be replicated by firms included in this type of commerce, in order to evaluate the behavior and perception of their customers about their performance in the online environment. This study also highlights trust, information quality and perceived usefulness of the website as the most influencing factors of the consumers’ participation in social commerce. In addition, the authors identified that more expensive products and products classified as computers and electronics seem to use more intensively ratings, recommendations and comments online provided by other people. This fact supports the research literature that (positive or negative) online recommendations influence the consumers purchase behavior, reducing uncertainties about the products and increasing credibility and trust.
Highlights
During the last few years, the growing popularity of social networking sites (SNS) has generated several changes, both socially and electronically, originating a new type of e-commerce, which has been changing the way online shopping has been done, called social commerce or s-commerce (Zhou et al, 2013, Chen and Shen, 2015)
Aiming at identifying factors that influence consumers in the participation of social commerce, we found different studies addressing several aspects associated with this theme
We found a systematic review elaborated by Friedrich (2016), who identified in 61 academic publications a list structured by factors related to the adoption of social commerce by consumers (Figure 1)
Summary
During the last few years, the growing popularity of social networking sites (SNS) has generated several changes, both socially and electronically, originating a new type of e-commerce, which has been changing the way online shopping has been done, called social commerce or s-commerce (Zhou et al, 2013, Chen and Shen, 2015). Social commerce promotes transactions with the support of a large network of online peers (formed by friends, colleagues, acquaintances or unknown people) who share electronic shopping experiences related to products and services information. In this environment, social media (represented by SNS and social shopping, blogs, Wikipedia, as well as content-sharing sites like the YouTube) combine different content generated by users through many social network resources to create, initiate and spread information within online networks (Tang et al, 2012). The same report has identified, though, that some markets have seen “social fatigue” set, term used to indicate a drop in the number of people recommending products that they have bought on social networks (Lee et al, 2016)
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