The Antecedent and Consequence of Trust in Social Shopping

Abstract

The continuous fever of social media shows that social shopping signifies the main future e-commerce opportunities. For academics, it would be one of the most important and stimulating research topics, which creates values of great theoretical and practical implication. This paper aims to reveal the importance of understanding trust in a website and trust in product recommendation to enhance purchase intention through social network service (perceived ability, perceived integrity, and perceived critical mass). The research model is empirically tested with survey data from 170 respondents who have experienced social shopping in South Korea. The findings indicated that social network service can be conceptualized as a composite of three dimensions (perceived ability, perceived integrity, and perceived critical mass) and perceived critical mass is the most important factor for social network service. Second, social network service has positive influences on trust in a website, trust in product recommendation, and purchase intention. Interestingly, social network service has the most effect on trust in a website and the least effect on trust in product recommendation. Third, trust in a website has positive influences on trust in product recommendation and purchase intention. Fourth, trust in product recommendation has a positive influence on purchase intention. While social network service has the most impact on purchase intention of social shopping, trust in a website has the least impact on it. Thus, the research model demonstrated the importance of social network service to purchase intention. Social shopping websites should focus on establishing the higher level of social network service that can provide the useful information about product recommendations and effective website designs that customers trust.