Online Impulse Purchase in Social Commerce: Roles of Social Capital and Information Overload

Abstract

Although social commerce induces consumers’ impulse purchase behavior, no work has been done to examine the impacts of different uses of social commerce on online impulse purchase and their influencing mechanisms. Grounded on the stimulus-organism-response theory, this study explored the relationships between cognitive use (CU), hedonic use (HU), and social use (SU) of social commerce (SC) and online impulse purchase (OIP) and technostress (TS), with mediating effect of social capital and information overload (IO). Non-probability purposive samples of 693 respondents were collected via a questionnaire survey in different provinces of China, and the data were scrutinized with Smart Partial Least Squares (SmartPLS). The results reveal that SU, CU, and HU positively affect social bridging (SBR), social bonding (SBO), and IO. Furthermore, SBR and SBO positively influence OIP, but SBO negatively influences TS. Moreover, IO positively influences TS but negatively influences OIP. Additionally, TS hurts OIP. This is the first study that incorporated different uses of social commerce (i.e., SU, CU, and HU) and investigated their positive and adverse effects on OIP. The study helps understand SC uses’ influencing mechanisms on customers’ OIP. The results show the positive role of social capital (i.e., SBR and SBO) in enhancing OIP. It also shows that improper and uncontrolled use of SC could lead to stress or switching behavior. The research also offers guidelines for managers to grow more constructive tactics for promoting consumers’ impulse purchases.