Social Commerce Adoption Research Articles

Leveraging sociability for trust building on social commerce sites

• 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.

Revised and Extended Social Commerce Technology Adoption in e-business of Pakistan

Social commerce is a new perspective change in modern electronic business procedures bringing together individuals on social media sites and opens up another electronic social marketing channel to establish business. In developing countries like Pakistan, e-business can help organizations using social commerce and social marketing intelligently on particular social network sites to grasp their business clients while they are interacting with their online community on the social media sites. This study investigated consumers’ behavior towards adoption of social commerce and introduced a revised and extended social commerce technology model. The investigation proved the proposed model is valid by confirming loading factor, Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin (KMO), reliability analysis, and structural equation modeling approach for hypotheses tests. The study found Perceived Ease of Use (PEU), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Social Media Influence (SMI), and Risk (RI) have significant impact on social commerce adoption in e-business of Pakistan. More, Trust (TR) and Web experience (WXP) were insignificant that revealed the preventive behavior towards adoption of social commerce in e-business of Pakistan.

Do Personality Traits and Shopping Motivations Affect Social Commerce Adoption Intentions? Evidence from an Emerging Market

Social commerce has become a hot topic since the beginning of Web 2.0 era; however, relevant research is scarce in emerging economies. This study aims to fill this research gap and answer the main research question of “what type of relevant personality traits and shopping motivations affect social commerce adoption intentions”. The research model was developed upon personality traits (openness to experience, need for uniqueness and buying impulsiveness) that are deemed to be relevant to online shopping and social media use. An online questionnaire was conducted on social media users. A total of 269 valid questionnaires were analyzed via structural equation modeling to test for the proposed relationships, majority of which emerged as non-linear. The findings highlight the significance of socialization motives in addition to utilitarian and hedonic shopping motives on social commerce adoption intentions. Openness to experience emerged as a significant trait that has an indirect effect on social commerce adoption intentions. Age and education materialized as significant demographics influencing shopping motivations in a social commerce setting.

The effect of social connectedness on consumer adoption of social commerce in apparel shopping

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of social connectedness on social media users’ attitudes and intentions towards adopting social commerce in the technology acceptance model (TAM). Data collected from young adult social media users (n = 446) in the US support the proposed model. A structural equation model shows that social connectedness positively influences social media users’ perceptions of ease of use, usefulness, and enjoyment, which in turn, influence their attitudes and intentions towards adopting social commerce in apparel shopping. The impact of social connectedness is stronger on perceived ease of use than other TAM variables. Perceived enjoyment has the strongest impact on attitudes, and attitudes strongly influence consumer intentions for adopting social commerce for apparel purchases. Results of this study reveal that social connectedness enhances social media users’ perceptions of social commerce and positively leads to the adoption of social commerce in apparel shopping. Findings indicate that social connectedness has an indirect effect on attitudes towards social commerce through utilitarian (i.e., ease of use and usefulness) and hedonic (i.e., enjoyment) perceptions of social commerce. These findings highlight the importance of social connectedness through utilitarian and hedonic perceptions in enhancing consumers’ adoption of social commerce for purchasing apparel products.

The Driving Forces of Facebook Social Commerce

Trust is viewed as a crucial factor in social commerce due to the prominent role and significant amount of peer-generated contents. The current study aims to investigate the relationship between trust in social commerce and customers' purchase intentions by providing a mechanism to describe this relationship. Thus, a proposed model is developed based on three concepts: social presence, social commerce information seeking and familiarity with the platform. The model explains the mechanisms through which social commerce information seeking, familiarity, social presence and trust influence customers' intentions to purchase from social commerce platforms. For the purpose of this study, a survey is designed and distributed to Facebook users. The findings demonstrate that trust in a social networking site has positive influence on purchase intentions. Moreover, trust encourages information seeking, which in turn improves purchase intentions. Furthermore, both social presence and familiarity are found to enhance trust and purchase intentions. According to the findings, several managerial and theoretical implications are highlighted. Particularly, as the first study to investigate the adoption of social commerce among Jordanian customers, this study offers valuable insights and implications for Jordanian firms' managers and marketers who are targeting direct sales on social networking platforms.

A systematic review on social commerce

Social commerce is rapidly growing owing to widespread Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 applications in electronic commerce. Today, social commerce is approximately known both in terms of practical as well as theoretical area; and little effort has been made to determine the current state of the studies in this new research area. In this paper, we systematically review studies in social commerce to have a better understanding of social commerce. We perform two stage processes and identify 81 studies in stage 1 and 55 studies in stage 2 that related to social commerce based on the research protocol. The results reveal that academic research in the area of social commerce has started since 2007. Studies are in different themes, but most of them are related to customer behavior, social commerce website design, and social commerce adoption. This study shows that social commerce is promising research area; it specifies the direction for future research by identifying research gaps based on the results of the systematic review and investigating the studies related to the main topics in recent four years.

Revealing the Influential Factors Driving Social Commerce Adoption

Aim/Purpose: This study aims to identify the main factors influencing consumers’ adoption of social commerce (s-commerce). Based on the socio-technical theory, the study suggests a research model that investigates the key social and technical factors driving consumers’ decision to purchase from social commerce websites. In addition, the research model explores the interactive relationship among these factors. Background: The phenomenon of social commerce (s-commerce) has emerged due to the increased penetration of social media and the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) companies have made significant efforts to shift their operations to s-commerce. Therefore, to facilitate their efforts to transform, various research has been conducted to investigate the main factor influencing the adoption of s-commerce. Most of these studies have emphasised the social aspects related to s-commerce design features to understand how the use of advanced web technologies influence how customers interact with each other in s-commerce environments. However, s-commerce is viewed as a socio-technical system that requires the investigation of both social and technical factors to help in the design of effective s-commerce platforms. Methodology: To validate the proposed research model, 418 paper-based and online questionnaires were collected from online shoppers in Jordan. The Structure Equation Modelling (SEM) approach was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Contribution: This study offers a research model that serves as a theoretical framework for investigating customers’ behaviour in s-commerce environment. It represents a strong context-specific model that includes both the technical and social facilitators of s-commerce. The research model participates in gaining an improved understanding of how customers’ intention, actual purchase and post-purchase experience are formed in the s-commerce environment. Findings: The results of Structure Equation Modelling (SEM) reveal that s-commerce constructs, familiarity and user experience have a positive influence on the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of s-commerce. In addition, perceptions of its usefulness and ease of use have a positive influence on trust, which in turn influences the purchase intention and the actual purchase. Finally, the post-purchase experience significantly influences both trust and purchase intention. Recommendations for Practitioners: This study shows that social commerce constructs strengthen customers’ perceptions of usefulness. S-commerce service providers are required to provide their customers with various channels to seek social support. Both familiarity and user experience are key enablers of customers’ perceived ease of use. S-commerce service providers consider the variation in customers’ familiarity and experience with s-commerce websites because this has a significant influence on purchase intentions and behaviour. Consequently, system designers should offer useful and sufficient information and tutorials that effectively guide customers in their searching, decision-making and purchasing activities throughout the shopping process. S-commerce service providers should understand the importance of providing secure payment systems and make their privacy policies clear to customers. Post-purchase experience has an influential role in reinforcing customers’ trust and purchase intention. The findings confirm the important role of post-purchase experience in retaining customers by improving their trust and repurchase intention. Therefore, making a customer’s post-purchase experience pleasant should be a key priority for s-commerce service providers because it has a significant influence on customers’ trust and repurchase intentions. Recommendation for Researchers: This study offers a unidimensional conceptualisation of the design features of s-commerce. These features include three main forms: recommendations and referrals, communities and forums, and reviews and ratings. Such conceptualisation provides additional insights and an understanding of the activities of information sharing in s-commerce. The significance of the technical side of s-commerce is highlighted and empirical proof is provided that social interactions guided by social technologies enhance customers’ perceived usefulness of an s-commerce website, thus increasing their trust and intention to purchase which leads to an actual purchase. This offers insights into the various types of s-commerce characteristics that contribute to facilitating customers’ purchase behaviour on s-commerce websites. Impact on Society: The findings offer insights which have important implications for research and practice to help facilitate the adoption of s-commerce. Future Research: This study considered the s-commerce websites as a homogenous online environment. Additional research could collect data from diverse online communities, such as professional groups, to provide a comprehensive understanding of how a wider variety of user behaviour is affected. Second, this was a quantitative study based on data collected in a questionnaire. Further studies may consider using qualitative or mixed methodologies (i.e. focus groups and interviews) to explore other technical and social factors that influence the use of s-commerce.

A network-based conceptualization of social commerce and social commerce value

An increasing number of businesses and consumers talk about, invest, and engage in social commerce, which is a form of commerce mediated by social media. Despite the growing recognition and adoption of social commerce, its practice is often driven by fast-paced technological evolutions, hype, and ad-hoc business cases. In parallel, social commerce has been the target of limited scientific inquiries, and it remains ill conceived, which constitutes an obstacle to theory development and cumulative research. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a focus on social commerce networks (SCNs). SCNs refer to the digital network ties created and leveraged by consumers and business entities as they connect and interact among and between each other. Based on this definition, the paper develops a typology of key SCN structures, and it proposes a framework depicting the value that consumers and businesses can gain from creating and exploiting them. We explain how the proposed SCN concept, typology, and framework can guide future conversations on the topic of social commerce, and how they can provide researchers and practitioners with a better understanding of social commerce and its considerable value potential.

Factors Influencing Beliefs Formation towards the Adoption of Social Commerce in SME Travel Agencies

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that influence beliefs formation towards the adoption of social commerce in SME travel agencies. Accordingly, a distal-proximal model is developed to study CEOs’ beliefs towards the usefulness of social commerce. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey of travel agencies’ CEOs in Isfahan, Iran. With 180 collected data from respondents, the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling approach was taken to assess both measurement and structural models of the study. The results revealed that CEOs’ innovativeness and attitude towards IT as individual factors, and organizational resources as institutional factor were significantly explained beliefs formation of respondents towards the usefulness of social commerce. However, it was found that the influences of CEOs’ IT knowledge, subjective norms (professional peers, employees) and firm size on perceived usefulness were found insignificant. Implications of the study are further discussed.

The Influence of Enjoyment Factor Toward the Acceptance of Social Commerce

Social commerce is a new extension of electronic commerce that involves using social media in the online shopping process. Although the adoption of social technologies was studied in several researches, it is still needed to investigate the specific characteristics of social commerce and the affecting factors on its acceptance. This article verifies the influence of the enjoyment factor on the adoption of social commerce through applying a questionnaire sample allocated to 282 Jordanian social media users from those who are interested in online shopping. The research model is developed to validate the impact of enjoyment, in addition to some other factors, on the behavioral intentions to adopt and use social commerce. The results show that the enjoyment is a key factor on accepting social commerce. The research model indicates that it is viable and has a good power in explaining the variance in the behavioral intentions to adopt and use social commerce.

Predicting Individuals’ Usage Intention of Social Commerce

Online interactions pave the way for new streams of collaborations and support among connected users of social networking sites, and this collaboration is leveraged for business purposes. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a growing body of research on social commerce by studying individuals’ behavior from the consumer perspective of information technology innovations. By adopting “social support” and the technology acceptance model as a theoretical base, this study used a web-based questionnaire survey to collect data from 325 users of SNSs in Jordan. The data were then analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences regression. Jordan was selected because it is a country that has reported high SNS usage compared to other countries. The main factors that were identified as playing a significant role in individual adoption of social commerce were social commerce construct and perceived usefulness. This study did not find enough evidence that perceived ease of use and perceived information quality were a significant determinant of social commerce adoption. These findings have important implications and value for the academia, businesses managers, and social media specialists in terms of formulating better strategies for handling social commerce effects on businesses. For social media specialists, using the research model in this study can assist in increasing their understanding of why some individuals choose to adopt social commerce services. Additionally, business managers may need to improve their interaction with SNS users and develop a better understanding of how consumers use social commerce in the purchasing decision process. Based on our review of the existing scientific literature on social commerce, few empirical studies have been conducted to scientifically evaluate and explain the usage behavior of social commerce in Jordan. This paper contributes to the continuing research in social commerce adoption and diffusion in the individual context.

THE EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED RISK ON SOCIAL COMMERCE ADOPTION BASED ON TAM MODEL

As the Internet has led to the emergence of electronic commerce, the development of social networks has led to the emergence of the concept of social commerce. Since the acceptance of new technology can be somewhat challenging, the effect of perceived risk on the adoption of social commerce is examined from the perspective of Internet users. For this purpose, a conceptual model based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been created to take into account different types of risks, including financial, functional, social, time, psychological, and privacy risks. The results of the study, which used a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach and partial least squares (PLS), revealed that, among 277 active users of social media, the perceived risk has a significant impact on the perceived usefulness of social commerce. Moreover, among different constructs of risk, psychological, and social risks doesn’t have a noticeable effect on commerce adoption. To cite this document: Saba Torki Biucky, Neda Abdolvand, and Saeedeh Rajaee Harandi, "THE EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED RISK ON SOCIAL COMMERCE ADOPTION BASED ON THE TAM MODEL", International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies, Vol.8, No.2, pp.134-157, 2017. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.7903/ijecs.1538

Social commerce adoption among Jordanian youth: empirical study

Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce, which utilises social networking tools. Customers' adoption of this new technology is not addressed by researchers in Jordan and consequently not yet completely understood. To our knowledge, this research is the first one that studied Jordanians intention to adopt social commerce. This study proposed a conceptual model based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and empirically tested using a survey of 299 Jordanian respondents. Findings of the study showed that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, information quality, social support, and trust significantly impacted Jordanian's intention to adopt s-commerce. Results of this study showed that the five constructs of the model explained (33.6%) of the variance of respondent's intention. In addition, the F-test of the model's variables was highly significant which means that there is a linear relationship between those variables. Thus, results of this study demonstrate the applicability of our model in testing this phenomenon.

Social commerce adoption research from the consumer context: a literature review

This study examined the adoption of social commerce from the consumer perspective of information technology innovations. An overview of the concept of innovation adoption and social media definitions and functions are presented as well as the concepts of social commerce; these are identified to offer some background. Furthermore, previous researches investigating social commerce are highlighted and the empirical research investigating social commerce adoption utilising IS theories are described in detail. Finally, the discussion, research gaps and future lines of research are highlighted.

Social commerce adoption among Jordanian youth: empirical study

Social commerce adoption among Jordanian youth: empirical study

Social commerce adoption research from the consumer context: a literature review

This study examined the adoption of social commerce from the consumer perspective of information technology innovations. An overview of the concept of innovation adoption and social media definitions and functions are presented as well as the concepts of social commerce; these are identified to offer some background. Furthermore, previous researches investigating social commerce are highlighted and the empirical research investigating social commerce adoption utilising IS theories are described in detail. Finally, the discussion, research gaps and future lines of research are highlighted.

On the Factors Influencing Consumers’ Adoption of Social Commerce – A Review of the Empirical Literature

Social commerce, the combination of e-commerce activities and social media, is a lucrative means for e-commerce companies to increase their sales volumes. As social commerce initiatives considerably depend on the consumers’ social interactions, it becomes important for companies to understand how consumers can be stimulated to participate in social commerce. While several empirical studies have already focused on investigating what factors influence consumers to adopt to social commerce, the findings of these studies are scattered across the literature base, sometimes not transparent, and not straightforwardly comparable. To synthesize these findings, we conduct a systematic review of the empirical literature on the consumers’ adoption of social commerce. In particular, we identify and classify conceptually similar factors and outcome variables (i.e., behavioral intentions and/or behaviors). Moreover, we apply a votecounting technique and a sign test to aggregate the reported effects between the factors and outcome variables. After analyzing 61 academic publications, we contribute a structured and comprehensive list of factors and their potential effects on various adoption-related outcome variables. Our results reveal that for some factors, such as trust, usefulness, or social influence, the effects point in a clear direction, while for several other factors, such as enjoyment, risk, or social presence, the effects are yet not clear and require further investigations.

Generation-Y shopping: the impact of network externalities and trust on adoption of social commerce

Many commercial companies are keen to exploit the rapid transformation of electronic commerce into social commerce. Social commerce is increasingly being observed in the purchasing behaviour of college-aged Generation-Y consumers. Drawing on theory of reasoned action, this study examines the strength and significance of trust and network externalities on social commerce adoption. By linking security, situational normality, vendor familiarity and structural assurance as determinants of trust, we propose a model of an individual's intention to engage in social commerce. Our model adds network externalities as antecedents influencing an individual's normative beliefs. Our findings reveal that security, situational normality and structural assurance have positive effect on trust. Number of peers has a positive relationship with normative beliefs. Both trust and normative beliefs are inextricably linked to behavioural intention. Our results provide insight into the role of trust and network externalities on social commerce adoption, thereby allowing social commerce providers to develop innovative strategies to compete in the social commerce industry.

Cognitive and affective factors influencing customer adoption of social commerce: an empirical study

The purpose of this study is to explore the determinants that influence a customer's adoption of social commerce. We seek a broader understanding from a cognitive and affective perspective to explain the formation of a customer's attitude. Based primarily on the theory of reasoned action, and supplemented by the cognitive, affective, and social influence, a sample of 446 customers of social commerce in Taiwan was tested. The findings show that perceived usefulness, communication quality, epistemic curiosity, affect-based trust, satisfaction, perceived playfulness, external influence, and interpersonal influence are critical determinants of a customer's attitude formation. The implications and recommendations for social commerce are discussed.

SOCIAL COMMERCE FOR INNOVATION

Interconnectivity and social relationships of customers on social platforms offered by Web 2.0 technologies drive value for business. Customers are using social technologies to share their information and gain access to others' information and advice, which helps them to know better the products and services or support businesses in innovation process. This research proposes a social commerce adoption model based on the relationships of customers on the internet and social platforms to investigate customer behaviour in New Product Development. The study gathers survey data and applies structural equation modelling to analyze the data. The result shows forums and communities and perceived usefulness (PU) positively affect users' trust, leading to more intention to buy among consumers. The discussions, implications, and conclusion are discussed at the end of the paper.