The power of a thumbs-up: Will e-commerce switch to social commerce?

By taking advantage of social networking capabilities, social commerce provides features that encourage customers to share their personal experiences. The popularity of online social networks has driven the purchase decisions of buyers on social commerce sites, but few studies have explored why consumers switch between e-commerce (product-centered) and social (social-centered) commerce sites. In applying the push–pull–mooring model, the objective of this study was to gain an understanding of specifically how push, pull, and mooring factors shape their switching intentions. The findings revealed that push effect, in terms of low transaction efficiency, drives customers away from e-commerce sites, whereas the pull effects, including social presence, social support, social benefit, and self-presentation, attract customers to social commerce sites. Moreover, mooring effects, including conformity and personal experience, strengthened consumers’ behavior in switching between e-commerce and social commerce sites. Besides, conformity was also found to moderate the influences of social presence, social support, social benefit, and efficiency on switching intention, whereas personal experience moderated the effects of social benefit, self-presentation, and efficiency on switching intention. Such an understanding assists online retailers in understanding online shoppers’ switching behaviors, and thus turning social interactions into profits and sales.     

Under what conditions will social commerce business models survive?

This study provides a model that captures the essential features of the social commerce business. The model focuses on the relationship between key decision issues, such as marketing expenditures and the revenue streams that are created. As more social commerce businesses enter the marketplace, they are faced with fierce competition, which may lead to sharp increases in marketing and advertising expenditures. This type of competition may lead the industry away from its optimal development path, and at worst, toward a disruption of the entire industry. Another goal of this study is to examine the possibility that the tragedy of commons may occur in the industry. The basic analysis presents Nash equilibrium results with homogeneous and heterogeneous players. The analysis further specifies the conditions that the tragedy of commons can occur. I discuss the strategic implications and policy directions that may be able to overcome the shortcomings of current business model, and help the industry to achieve more sustainable development.     

How do interruptions affect user contributions on social commerce?

Social commerce is an extension of e‐commerce, in which social media is leveraged to promote user contributions. Our study asks how interruptions in relation to interface design influence two types of user contributions: creating shared content and appreciating others' content. We use two interface designs, pagination and infinite scrolling, to manipulate the extent of interruptions to social commerce users. On the basis of the capacity theory of attention, we develop five hypotheses. We empirically test our model using a lab experiment and a field study to show that interruptions reduce users' content appreciation but increase their content creation and that user characteristics moderate these effects. The theoretical and practical contributions of our study are discussed.     

Should firms invest in social commerce? An integrative perspective

Integrating resource-based view and opportunity–motivation–ability framework, we theorize that social commerce represents firms’ opportunity to access valuable social media resources and gain a competitive advantage. We further argue that product uncertainty and firm reputation indicate firms’ motivation and ability, respectively, to use the social media resources, affecting the extent to which the competitive advantage can be realized. An event study of 275 social commerce initiatives announced between 2006 and 2011 supports our arguments, showing that social commerce increases firms’ stock returns, but such increases are more significant for firms selling products with high uncertainty and having high reputation.     

What motivates customers to participate in social commerce? The impact of technological environments and virtual customer experiences

Social commerce, as a relatively new phenomenon, has attracted little research attention. This study aims to provide initial insights into the dynamics of customer participation in social commerce. Based on the stimulus–organism–response paradigm, this study develops a model to investigate the effects of technological features (perceived interactivity, perceived personalization and perceived sociability) of social commerce on customers’ virtual experiences (social support, social presence and flow) and subsequently their participation intention. The results indicate that social commerce intention is determined by social support, social presence and flow experiences. These experiences, in turn, are influenced by perceived interactivity, personalization and sociability features.     

See now,act now: How to interact with customers to enhance social commerce engagement?

Although live social commerce apps have emerged as a marketing channel recently, live social commerce, as a relatively new phenomenon, has attracted little attention. The authors aim to explore the effect of live interactions on social commerce engagement based on the stimulus–organism–response paradigm and the moderating effect of susceptibility to informative influence. The findings show that live interactions (i.e., personalization, responsiveness, entertainment, mutuality, perceived control) positively affect perceived usefulness and negatively impact perceived risk and psychological distance, promoting social commerce engagement. The results provide theoretical insights on live interactions and social e-commerce and contribute managerial implications for practitioners.     

Disclosing too much? Situational factors affecting information disclosure in social commerce environment

The buying and selling of goods and services are no longer limited to a general website or a physical store as social networks, such as Facebook or Pinterest, are heavily focusing on social commerce. Prior studies have analyzed impact of trust and culture on social commerce, design and interface aspects of it, and intention to use social commerce by general people. Our study is informed by the literature on information disclosure intention, and Communication Privacy Management theory and is motivated by the fundamental premise that intention to self-disclose in social commerce is affected by perceived ownership of information, privacy apathy, the risks and benefits of disclosure and fairness of information exchange. We analyzed data collected from 252 samples using the scenario method. The results show that shoppers’ information disclosure intention is driven by the fairness of information exchange, privacy benefits and privacy apathy.     

Does big data mean big knowledge? Integration of big data analysis and conceptual model for social commerce research

The Big Data era has descended on many communities, from governments and e-commerce to health organizations. Information systems designers face great opportunities and challenges in developing a holistic big data research approach for the new analytics savvy generation. In addition business intelligence is largely utilized in the business community and thus can leverage the opportunities from the abundant data and domain-specific analytics in many critical areas. The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of these trends in the current business context through evidence-based documentation of current and emerging applications as well as their wider business implications. In this paper, we use BigML to examine how the two social information channels (i.e., friends-based opinion leaders-based social information) influence consumer purchase decisions on social commerce sites. We undertake an empirical study in which we integrate a framework and a theoretical model for big data analysis. We conduct an empirical study to demonstrate that big data analytics can be successfully combined with a theoretical model to produce more robust and effective consumer purchase decisions. The results offer important and interesting insights into IS research and practice.     

What motivates consumer to engage in microblogs? The roles of brand post characteristics and brand prestige

Electronic Commerce Research - Microblogs have gained concerns from both academics and practitioners owing to their great potential for communication and diffusion. Brand managers can release posts...     

Skewing users’ rational risk considerations in social commerce: An empirical examination of the role of social identification

Social commerce has emerged as a new platform that enables users to conduct shopping assisted by inputs from other members and to publicly comment on transactions or products. It therefore adds a social aspect to traditional online commerce environments. Nevertheless, the role of the social facet embedded in such transactions in influencing user behaviors is not fully understood. In this study, we rely on theories of risk deterrence in decision-making and the “risky/choice shift” logic to suggest that the social identification of users regarding their community members skews the way they consider risks in decision-making on these sites. Using data from 175 users of etsy.com, we show that perceived commerce risk reduces intentions to buy from the website and that perceived participation risk curtails intentions to post comments on social commerce forums. The findings further show that the influence of these risk assessments is reduced when the degree of social identification with the website community increases; these risk considerations become negligible in decision-making processes when ’social identification is one standard deviation above the mean. Hence, users’ social identification with the social commerce website community skews their rational decision-making.     

How do product recommendations affect impulse buying? An empirical study on WeChat social commerce

Social commerce is creating increasing opportunities for consumers to access product recommendations. Evidence from practical and academic literature shows that product recommendations may lead to impulse buying, yet relatively limited research exists on this topic. Based on the signaling theory, this research proposes a model to examine how product recommendations on social media affect a user’s urge to buy impulsively. Our results indicate that urge to buy impulsively is determined by affective trust in the recommender and affection toward the recommended product, which are influenced by both recommender-related signals (information quality and similarity) and product-related signals (vicarious expression and aesthetic appeal).     

The threats of social networking: Old wine in new bottles?

Despite the many potential benefits to its users, social networking appears to provide a rich setting for criminal activities and other misdeeds. In this paper we consider whether the risks of social networking are unique and novel to this context. Having considered the nature and range of applications to which social networks may be applied, we conclude that there are no exploits or fundamental threats inherent to the social networking setting. Rather, the risks and associated threats treat this communicative and social context as an enabler for existing, long established and well-recognised exploits and activities.     

Intra-relation or inter-relation?: Exploiting social information for Web document summarization

Traditional summarization methods only use the internal information of a Web document while ignoring its social information such as tweets from Twitter, which can provide a perspective viewpoint for readers towards an event. This paper proposes a framework named SoRTESum to take the advantages of social information such as document content reflection to extract summary sentences and social messages. In order to do that, the summarization was formulated in two steps: scoring and ranking. In the scoring step, the score of a sentence or social message is computed by using intra-relation and inter-relation which integrate the support of local and social information in a mutual reinforcement form. To calculate these relations, 16 features are proposed. After scoring, the summarization is generated by selecting top m ranked sentences and social messages. SoRTESum was extensively evaluated on two datasets. Promising results show that: (i) SoRTESum obtains significant improvements of ROUGE-scores over state-of-the-art baselines and competitive results with the learning to rank approach trained by RankBoost and (ii) combining intra-relation and inter-relation benefits single-document summarization.     

Is social capital effective for online learning?

The popularity of online social networking has heightened academic interest in social capital. However, few studies have investigated the role of social capital in online learning. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of data from online MIS classes, we find that online learning facilitates social capital formation mostly in terms of the dimensions of community, trust, collective action and cooperation, communication, and sociability and inclusion, depending on the media-based human interaction forms of online learning employed. Structural equation modeling confirms a causal effect of social capital on student satisfaction. Social capital is also found to positively affect learning outcomes as measured by students’ group project scores but not class scores. The study's contribution to the literature and practice are discussed.     

Does friendship quality matter in social commerce? An experimental study of its effect on purchase intention

Friendship plays a critical role in social commerce in contemporary societies. This study aims to theorize and examine how friendship quality impacts purchase intention. Product-related risk is introduced to gain insight into its moderating effects on intention to purchase from three different seller groups. Through empirical evidence, we confirm that friendship quality has positively effect on purchase intention. In particular, friends with high friendship quality (i.e., good friends) are more conducive to selling high-price high-risk products. However, friends with low friendship quality (i.e., simple friends) are not as attractive as strangers having good user reviews (i.e., reputable strangers). In other words, people are more willing to buy from reputable strangers than from simple friends. Theoretically, these results contribute to a better understanding of the effect of friendship quality on purchase intention. Finally, this research offers several practical implications for developing successful businesses in social commerce.     

How Important Are Enjoyment and Mobility for Mobile Applications?

This article investigates how perceived enjoyment and mobility drive user continuance intentions toward using mobile applications. A second-stage continuance model was developed after a thorough literature review. A survey instrument was deployed to collect data from 584 smartphone users. The model was empirically tested using structural equation modeling procedures. Data analyses show that the salience of disconfirmation and beliefs in enjoyment and mobility serve as the primary driver of the changes in satisfaction and attitude toward continuance intentions. Furthermore, perceived enjoyment, mobility and satisfaction jointly explained over 60% of the variance in post-usage attitude. As an initial effort to revise and test the expanded IS continuance model, this study deepens our understanding of enjoyment and mobility at post-usage stage of mobile experience. It urges mobile application providers to forge continuance by devoting more resources and efforts toward creating a truly enjoyable as well as mobile experience.     

Advergame speed influence and brand recall: The moderating effects of brand placement strength and gamers’ persuasion knowledge

This study explores the effect of advergame speed, brand placement strength and consumers’ persuasion knowledge on brand recall from the perspectives of attention and elaboration. Results show that low-speed advergames result in high brand recall as compared to high-speed advergames. A two-way interaction effect between advergame speed and brand placement strength reveals that for a low-speed advergame, a prominent brand placement results in higher brand recall than a subtle brand placement; for a high-speed advergame, there is no difference in brand recall between a prominent brand placement and a subtle brand placement. Further, for a low-speed advergame with prominent brand placement, subjects with high persuasion knowledge report higher brand recall than subjects with low persuasion knowledge. However, for a high-speed advergame with prominent brand placement, there is no difference in brand recall between subjects with high persuasion knowledge and subjects with low persuasion knowledge. Implications are provided.