Integrative qualities and dimensions of social commerce: Toward a unified view

Abstract

The wide popularity and rapid growth of social commerce have opened a new arena for business and grand opportunities for Information Systems (IS) research. However, there is only a limited theoretical understanding of and even less substantive empirical grounding on how social media technologies, providers, and customers interact to achieve social commerce initiatives and opportunities. This study integrates the service-dominant (S-D) logic and customer-dominant (C-D) logic perspectives and both streams of service marketing and IS usage literature, and proposes a unified framework outlining key qualities and dimensions of social commerce and their interactions. We tested the framework with a large set of field survey data of 1250 social commerce customers. The results show that each of the proposed dimensions captures a unique prominent aspect of social commerce; the multi-dimensions combine to define the underlying structural nature and process of social commerce. Furthermore, the testing of the model validated the hypothesized interactive relationships of key social commerce qualities. The unified view contributes to IS research in general and social commerce innovations, and provides managerial implications for understanding the overall interactions of social commerce.