Social networking atmosphere and online retailing

Abstract

Online store atmosphere is an important determinant of shopping behavior. The rapid growth of online social networks means it is widely used in online stores in many patterns. We seek to address the lack of systematic research on how customer-to-customer social environment can influence consumer online shopping outcome. This study adopts the concept of social networking atmosphere of online stores and uses the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework widely used in environmental psychology to test whether the characteristics of the social networking environment of online stores can influence their consumers' shopping behavior. The characteristics of the social networking atmosphere are proposed to be convenience, personalization, and social surveillance. We received 270 valid responses from people who have experience using online stores with a social networking environment. The results indicate that the characteristics of the social networking environment (convenience, personalization, and social surveillance) will increase consumers' satisfaction with (affective) and perceived usefulness of (cognitive) the online store atmosphere, which in turn will increase the consumers' purchase intention in the online store with a social networking atmosphere. Moreover, males have better internal states to convenience and personalization than females and females have better internal states to social surveillance than males.