Towards a model of social commerce: improving the effectiveness of e-commerce through leveraging social media tools based on consumers’ dual roles

ABSTRACT

Social media has been integrated into traditional e-commerce, creating an innovative technology-based approach to changing business practice and service, yet few researchers have attempted to provide an understanding of how this approach is changing consumer decision-making and purchase behaviours. Combining the expectation-confirmation theory and the expectation-confirmation model and information systems continuance, we propose a model for social commerce, illustrating how social media is utilised in online shopping as a three-fold process (pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages) from a consumer perspective. The model consists of three phases: social commerce motivation, social commerce adoption, and e-commerce effectiveness. Using two rounds of surveys, we find that (1) autonomous motivation and controlled motivation have positive effects on social commerce information seeking and sharing, and (2) social commerce information seeking formulates consumers’ pre-purchase decisions, thus affecting their actual purchase outcomes, repurchase intentions, and social commerce information-sharing intentions in the post-purchase stage. In addition, our study indicates that consumers may play dual roles in social commerce: as information seekers in the pre-purchase stage and as information providers in the post-purchase stage. Our findings have important implications for literature and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Social commerce
• social media
• e-commerce
• consumer behaviour
• pre-purchase
• post-purchase
• purchase

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this study, we assumed that individuals choose to share product information voluntarily. That said, it is possible that some individuals (also known as “influencers”) might be paid to advertise certain products on social media (we thank one reviewer for pointing out this issue). The purpose is to let consumers feel that promotions come from recommendations by their friends rather than e-vendors, and consumers may not be able to differentiate between “genuine recommendations” and “paid recommendations.” Future studies are needed to further examine this important issue. For example, qualitative interviews can be conducted to understand whether/how consumers can differentiate different types of recommendations. Survey and experiments can also be conducted to understand how consumers respond to different types of recommendations.

2. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201929730 (Accessed on October 13 2021)

3. We thank one reviewer for suggesting this.

4. We thank one reviewer for pointing out this issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Murdoch University [Internal grant].