The Influencing Factors of Social Presence on Loyalty in Social Commerce: Mediating Role of Trust and Customer Satisfaction: An Abstract

Abstract

Social commerce has grown exponentially over the past decade as social media has become an integral part of people’s daily lives. Social commerce integrates social activities into e-commerce activities, resulting in an increased degree of social presence. Social commerce has higher growth averaging 40% per year, compared to e-commerce’s 6% per year (Statista, 2021). With such a high magnitude of growth, social commerce deserves the attention of practitioners and researchers. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of social presence on customers’ loyalty in social commerce. In particular, the study aim to test whether social presence has a direct or indirect impact on customer loyalty in social commerce. Through the lens of social presence theory, this research suggests two social presence variables, specifically the social presence of other buyers and the social presence of interaction with the sellers. These social presence variables are hypothesized to directly impact loyalty and indirect impact through trust and customer satisfaction. This proposed model was validated by 221 users of social commerce collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk. This study is different from previous studies in social commerce, which primarily focused on customer’s trust. This study examines how customer relationship is influenced by the social interaction in social commerce. The research investigates the antecedents of customer loyalty in social commerce which is derived from a good customer relationship. The study introduces a new mechanism of loyalty by investigating customer satisfaction in addition to trust. The findings showed that all direct and indirect predictors of loyalty were statistically significant except the relationship of social presence of interactivity and loyalty. Interestingly, the social presence of other buyers has twice the influence on customers’ loyalty compared to the social presence of interactivity. Moreover, customer satisfaction was found to be a stronger mediator than trust. The findings from this research contribute to the literature by delineating the mechanism of social presence influences on loyalty. The study also offers a well-proven conceptual model that explains customer loyalty in social commerce.