Leveraging sociability for trust building on social commerce sites

Abstract

• Purposes include two subdimensions: reputation building and informational support. • Rewards, shared norms, and authenticity were three subdimensions of policies. • Intimacy and common interests were extracted from the discussions for people. • Purposes, policies, and people of sociability affect consumer trust. With the increasing popularity of social media, consumers are increasingly generating and sharing content, facilitating the growth of social commerce sites. Studies have explored the factors driving consumers’ adoption of social commerce, but relatively few of them have investigated the role of sociability. Because sociability determines how users interact and the conceptualization of sociability remains unclear, this study extended the research of Preece by identifying seven elements of three subdimensions of sociability through focus-group discussions. The partial-least-squares analysis results suggested that the purposes, policies, and people aspects of sociability positively affect trust in product recommendations. In addition, the results from fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis revealed that all the elements of the subdimensions of sociability appear as conditions in one or more paths, and none of the conditions is present in all the causal paths identified. The results provide valuable information for academics and practitioners seeking to increase consumer trust through sociability.