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Casual selling practice: a qualitative study of non-professional sellers' involvement on C2C social commerce platforms
Abstract
Purpose
Recent substantial developments of consumer-to-consumer social commerce platforms (C2C-SCPs) emboldened consumers/users to be involved as sellers. Considering C2C social networks that privilege local reach, this paper aim to explore how the practice-based view informs non-professional sellers' involvement.
Design/methodology/approach
Underpinned by data from 29 semi-structured interviews with non-professional sellers on Kaskus, one of the largest local Indonesian C2C-SCPs, the study reveals the emergence of a novel structural practice that we call casual selling.
Findings
The findings show that casual selling allows non-professional sellers' involvement in C2C-SCPs through three broad categories of practices: priming oneself, producing commercial operations and valuing others. Within these three categories, non-professional sellers are found to generate both personal and collective involvement along nine situated market practices.
Research limitations/implications
This paper adds to previous research by introducing the practice-based view to social commerce literature. In doing so, it deals with the under-investigated seller's perspective and activities that prevail in C2C-SCPs.
Originality/value
In C2C-SCPs, casual selling constitutes a distinct mode of involvement in social commerce in which established professional selling standards are suspended. As a structural practice, it entices non-professional sellers to consider a wider variety of situations in which they are in dialogue with other individuals (buyers and sellers) to shape s-commerce potential. In doing so, C2C-SCP users draw on a dynamic intertwining between digital technology and the socio-cultural environment surrounding s-commerce.
... However, a new type of platform called "social commerce" has emerged as a combination of SNSs and e-commerce (Li and Ku, 2018). With its unique characteristics, more and more consumers join a social commerce because they can obtain various unique values and new experiences (Schwob et al., 2022;Sun et al., 2020). For example, consumers can follow live streaming and interact with different broadcasters, browse and buy various products, establish and maintain social relationships and engage in different entertainment (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). ...
... Therefore, this study investigates the third research question: (3) Does social overload play a moderating mechanism in the relationship between emotional exhaustion and switching intention and the indirect relationship between information confusion and switching intention through emotional exhaustion in the context of social commerce platforms? 2. Literature review 2.1 Social commerce in China Social commerce is a new type of business that combines SNSs and e-commerce (Lin et al., 2019;Schwob et al., 2022). Several functions of SNSs and e-commerce, such as live streaming, short videos, browsing, sharing, interaction, shopping and product recommendation are combined into a single platform of social commerce (Schwob et al., 2022;Tajvidi et al., 2021). ...
... 2. Literature review 2.1 Social commerce in China Social commerce is a new type of business that combines SNSs and e-commerce (Lin et al., 2019;Schwob et al., 2022). Several functions of SNSs and e-commerce, such as live streaming, short videos, browsing, sharing, interaction, shopping and product recommendation are combined into a single platform of social commerce (Schwob et al., 2022;Tajvidi et al., 2021). Sun et al. (2020) investigated the phenomenon of social commerce in China. ...
Purpose
On the basis of the approach-avoidance motivation theory, this study aims to examine the role of information confusion in influencing consumer switching intention among social commerce platforms, with the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of social overload.
Design/methodology/approach
This study applied a multi-method quantitative approach including a survey and two experiments. Data were obtained from consumers on popular social commerce platforms in China. The survey's sample size was 327 respondents, whereas a total of 1,621 consumers participated in the two experiments.
Findings
Findings from the survey reveal that information confusion affects switching intention directly and indirectly via emotional exhaustion. Moreover, social overload moderates the emotional exhaustion–switching intention relationship and the indirect impact of information confusion on switching intention. Results of the two experiments further confirm the relationships found in the survey.
Originality/value
This study develops and validates a mediation and moderation model which expectedly serves as a framework to better explain consumer switching intention on social commerce platforms. The study also offers fresh insights into consumer switching intention in the unique context of social commerce in an emerging market (i.e. China), which has been largely ignored in the prior literature.
... Customers have come to expect fast, secure, and cost-effective delivery options for their online purchases. Therefore, the parcel delivery industry plays a pivotal role in facilitating the growth of e-commerce, as well as s-commerce, in developing countries Parcu et al., 2023;Schwob et al., 2023). ...
In the context of the burgeoning digital economy, logistics service providers find themselves at a pivotal crossroads, particularly within developing countries where the market dynamics are rapidly evolving (Chin et al., 2023; Richey et al., 2023). This study delves into the price war phenomenon within the parcel service industry of Thailand and scrutinizes the implications of this competitive strategy. Using a quantitative research approach, this study collected data through an online questionnaire from a convenience sample of 405 participants in Thailand. The data underwent extensive analysis, employing both descriptive statistics to outline basic characteristics and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The study’s results highlighted the considerable influence of multiple factors — gender, age, education, socioeconomic status, income, residential location, logistics capabilities, and access to information — on the formulation and implementation of price war strategies within the market. These insights have the potential to provide valuable guidance to business proprietors, policymakers, and a spectrum of stakeholders. By implementing the recommendations and lessons gleaned from this research, these stakeholders can collectively contribute to the growth of a vibrant and efficient parcel delivery ecosystem, subsequently enhancing overall business competitiveness and elevating service quality for consumers in the continually evolving global marketplace.
... From a demand perspective, robots can provide "smart services" that elevate the user experience (Belanche et al., 2020;Manthiou and Klaus, 2022). However, a robot lacking interpersonal and adaptive skills is often perceived as less adept than human employees, evoking a negative user response (Schwob et al., 2023). Aligning with this discussion and the TTF model's theoretical underpinning, this study suggests that the service quality experience could significantly influence users' perception of robots being more suited than humans for parcel delivery tasks. ...
The pace of technological development is exceeding expectations and transforming the landscape of last-mile delivery. This study investigates how users' post-adoption behavior in using delivery robots is formed. Based on the task-technology fit (TTF) model, we present a research model that includes both direct and indirect factors that have been previously overlooked in the literature. We collected data from 550 users of delivery robots. Our structural equation modelling results show that two hedonic- (i.e., gratification and anthropomorphism) and three utilitarian- (i.e., service quality experience, delivery task requirements, and user-facing technology performance) driven factors predict perceived TTF in using delivery robots. Value-in-use and trust have sequential mediating effects that connect perceived TTF and service reuse likelihood and word-of-mouth recommendation. Our findings suggest ways to improve last-mile delivery robot strategies and provide practical implications for the industry.
... In the C2C business environment, PBs mainly refer to consumers' perceptions and evaluation of transaction-related factors. Therefore, PBs can be considered for the merchant's reputation (Schwob et al., 2023). The specific content of PBs includes five points, as shown in Figure 2. ...
With the popularity and development of the internet, China's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) electronic commerce (EC) system is favored by consumers. Therefore, understanding the relationship among consumers' trust, perceived benefits (PBs), and purchase intentions (PIs) is of great significance for studying this system. This article proposes the hypothesis of the interaction among the three and designs a questionnaire to explain the application of trust, PB, and PI in China's C2C EC system. The relationship between the sample structure and the variables is analyzed using reliability, validity, correlation, and regression analysis (RA). The experimental analysis results show that the questionnaire's reliability and validity values are higher than 0.8 and 0.75, respectively, indicating that the questionnaire design is qualified, and the data are valid. The rationality of the hypothesis proposed here is verified through correlation analysis and RA. This indicates a significant mutual influence relationship among trust, PB, and PI.
... Several studies have applied user personas to inform the development and testing of IT systems (Clarke, 2014;Destounis et al., 2004;Iivari, 2009;Kamoun and Almourad, 2014;Kautz, 2011;Schwob et al., 2022;Yau et al., 2019). In these use cases, user personas are typically presented in profiles showing various types of information, such as pictures, names, demographics, goals, needs and wants of the persona (Nielsen et al., 2015;Salminen et al., 2020a). ...
Purpose
The “what is beautiful is good” (WIBIG) effect implies that observers tend to perceive physically attractive people in a positive light. The authors investigate how the WIBIG effect applies to user personas, measuring designers' perceptions and task performance when employing user personas for the design of information technology (IT) solutions.
Design/methodology/approach
In a user experiment, the authors tested six different personas with 235 participants that were asked to develop remote work solutions based on their interaction with a fictitious user persona.
Findings
The findings showed that a user persona's perceived attractiveness was positively correlated with other perceptions of the persona. The personas' completeness, credibility, empathy, likability and usefulness increased with attractiveness. More attractive personas were also perceived as more agreeable, emotionally stable, extraverted and open, and the participants spent more time engaging with personas they perceived attractive. A linguistic analysis indicated that the IT solutions created for more attractive user personas demonstrated a higher degree of affect, but for the most part, task outputs did not vary by the personas' perceived attractiveness.
Research limitations/implications
The WIBIG effect applies when designing IT solutions with user personas, but its effect on task outputs appears limited. The perceived attractiveness of a user persona can impact how designers interact with and engage with the persona, which can influence the quality or the type of the IT solutions created based on the persona. Also, the findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.
Practical implications
The findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.
Originality/value
Because personas are created to closely resemble real people, the authors might expect the WIBIG effect to apply. The WIBIG effect might lead decision makers to favor more attractive personas when designing IT solutions. However, despite its potential relevance for decision making with personas, as far as the authors know, no prior study has investigated whether the WIBIG effect extends to the context of personas. Overall, it is important to understand how human factors apply to IT system design with personas, so that the personas can be created to minimize potentially detrimental effects as much as possible.
... Shen and Zue (2020) have defined personalisation to mean how consumers, acting as part of the group, can freely talk about their aspirations, needs and opinions, as well as communicate their unique preferences within the online community. Dependence refers to the extent to which the consumer is attached and yoked with other members of the online community (Schwob et al., 2022). The authors have suggested that consumers cherish information shared by their colleagues in online communities. ...
The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the main independent variable, e-marketing and the main dependent variable e-loyalty, as well as the mediating roles of e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The study adopted a positivist stance with a quantitative method, with the adoption of a descriptive correlational design. A Structural Equation Modelling approach was employed to examine the nature of the associations between the independent, mediating and dependent variables. A sensitivity analysis was also conducted to control for the potential confounding effects of the demographic factors. A sample size of 1,293 residents in Accra, Ghana, who had previously shopped online, responded to structured questionnaire in an online survey via Google Docs.
The IBM SPSS Amos 24 software was used to analyse the data collected. Positive
associations were found between the key constructs in the study: e-marketing, e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-Loyalty. The findings from the study gave further backing to the diffusion innovation theory, resource-based view theory, and technology acceptance model. In addition, e-service quality and e-satisfaction individually and jointly mediated the relationship between e-marketing and e-loyalty. However, these mediations were partial. . In terms of value and contribution, this is the first study in a developing economy context to undertake a holistic examination of the key marketing performance variables within an online shopping context. The study uniquely tested the mediation roles of both e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The findings of the study are novel in the e-marketing literature as they unearthed the key antecedents of e-loyalty for online SMEs in a developing economy context.
... In the C2C business environment, perceived benefits mainly refer to consumers' perception and evaluation of transaction-related factors, so it can be considered that perceived benefits are the reputation of merchants (Schwob et al., 2023). The specific content of perceived benefits includes five points, and Figure 2 shows the details. ...
Consumers in China highly favor the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce model, so it is crucial to understand the relationship between consumers' trust in merchants, perceived benefits, and purchase intentions. This article first elaborates on applying trust, perceived benefits, and purchase intention in China's C2C e-commerce model. Then, corresponding hypotheses are proposed, and the questionnaire is designed. Finally, reliability, validity, correlation, and regression analysis are applied to analyze the sample structure and the relationships between various variables. The experimental results show that the reliability and validity detection values are higher than 0.8 and 0.75, respectively, indicating that the reliability and validity of the questionnaire designed are qualified. In the correlation analysis, the hypothesis proposed is validated through correlation coefficients, and the rationality of the hypothesis is further verified through regression analysis.
Purpose
This study investigates the influence of the wisdom of the crowd (WSC), trust and perceived value on consumer purchase intentions within social commerce (s-commerce) platforms. By constructing a novel theoretical model, the research aims to delineate the interrelationships among these variables, addressing an emerging area in social interactions and information technology.
Design/methodology/approach
To empirically test and validate the proposed model, the study collected data from 442 Facebook users familiar with online shopping. The analysis employed Structural Equation Modeling – Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) to test the hypotheses and examine the relationships between WSC, trust, perceived value and purchase intentions.
Findings
The findings confirm that WSC significantly influences trust, perceived value and the intention to purchase on s-commerce platforms. Both perceived value and trust are substantial determinants of purchase intentions. Notably, the PLS analysis revealed that WSC accounts for 36.8% of the variance in trust and 33.1% of the variance in perceived value related to purchasing decisions on s-commerce platforms.
Originality/value
This research contributes uniquely to the ongoing discourse on s-commerce adoption by integrating WSC as a pivotal factor in understanding perceived value and consumer adoption intentions. It provides a fresh perspective on how collective intelligence affects consumer behavior in digital marketplaces, enriching the theoretical and practical understanding of s-commerce dynamics.
Group communication and collaborative shopping models are favoured by consumers, so research on group opinion has attracted the attention of businesspeople. Based on the dual-process model (DW model), interaction rules for developing consumer opinions are constructed, and the influence of factors such as group structure, sponsor characteristics, and sub-opinions on collaborative shopping is investigated via numerical simulations. The results show that the group structure of consumers is closely related to the success of the joint purchase. The sponsor influences the development of the sub-options of the group, which can split the original convergent and consistent opinions, and the sub-options of the group can split within a specific range. The conclusions can provide theoretical support for businesspeople to successfully carry out collaborative shopping and promote the vigorous development of social commerce.
The traditional e-commerce’s traffic dividend is gradually declining, while social e-commerce as a new business model has attracted numerous enterprises to jump into by virtue of the advantages of viral traffic aggregation and efficient conversion. How to improve the core competitiveness and stand out from the Red Ocean battle of traffic competition is of great significance for the healthy and sustainable development of social e-commerce platforms. In view of this, this study focuses on the issues related to the attractiveness of social e-commerce platforms from the consumer’s perceptive, with the aim of providing theoretical support for social e-commerce platforms to enhance their core competitiveness and formulate relevant development strategies and decision-making mechanisms. First, four key factors affecting the attractiveness of social e-commerce platforms based on the AISAS model are proposed: the ability to attract consumers to access, promote consumers’ purchase conversion, maintain consumers’ platform loyalty, and attract to share experiences. Second, an attractiveness assessment model for social e-commerce platform including four secondary indicators and corresponding 14 tertiary indicators is constructed by using Analytic Hierarchy Process, and an arithmetic example is demonstrated. Finally, management suggestions to enhance the attractiveness of social e-commerce platforms are presented.
Along with technological advancement, many sellers in Indonesia have shifted to use digital platform like e-commerce, which is creating potential ecosystem for various e-commerce applications to grow and face intense competition in facilitating direct transactions between consumers (C2C). This study aims to confirm the mobile service quality dimensions of e-commerce on mobile applications. The study adopts a quantitative approach with sellers who are use of popular C2C mobile applications in Indonesia, such as Tokopedia, Shopee, Bukalapak, and TikTok Shop as the population. Sample selection using purposive technique resulted in a sample size of 313 respondents. Testing was conducted using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to determine the proposed dimensions of e-commerce mobile application service quality from previous research. The results of the study confirm six factors of mobile service quality in e-commerce applications: Application Design, Reliability, Responsiveness, Trust, Efficiency, and System Availability. Testing with the modified model provides higher fit criteria. ANOVA was used to compare components in each dimension. E-commerce service providers can use the result to improve service quality. These improvements involve refining the application interface, ensuring reliability, responsiveness, security, efficiency, and system availability, aiming to boost user satisfaction, foster continued app usage, and fortify the service provider's reputation.
This study uses a content analysis method to systematically review 83 research papers from 2002-2018 to explore consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce research trends. The findings of this study indicate that (1) C2C e-commerce is discussed and investigated in many disciplines, but mainly published in e-commerce journals; (2) studies on C2C e-commerce increasingly focus on diverse topics, but concentrate on regions such as China and the United States; (3) the focus of academic collaboration has shifted from domestic to international collaboration, and collaboration within the same institution. However, collaboration is scarce across different study teams; (4) the data-driven approach is the main approach used in studies on C2C e-commerce; (5) while the number of recent C2C e-commerce studies adopted theories is increasing, few have developed theoretical frameworks or models. Finally, study implications and future study suggestions are also discussed.
Purpose
Recent decade has witnessed exponential growth in e-commerce segment, leading to emergence of various online selling platforms catering to diverse product requirements of customers. Such a development has provided impetus to both existing businesses and newly established ventures to make available their offerings through online selling platforms with a view to improve the reach of their products. This study is an attempt to identify the experience of registered vendors with the online marketplaces. It aims to develop and validate a scale to measure vendor's experience with e-commerce platforms.
Design/methodology/approach
As a part of the scale development process, relevant literature sources were scanned to spot the precise knowledge gap and to put in place a sound theoretical background for the study. Thereafter, a scientific approach was adopted for scale creation. First, the scale items were identified through interviews of vendors registered with major online selling platforms and other academic experts pertaining to the marketing domain. Subsequently, major dimensions of seller experience were identified through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) applied on data collected from active vendors by the means of a structured survey instrument. The final data set was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a bid to validate the scale.
Findings
The study’s outcomes reveal that seller experience in an online marketplace can be best captured by a multidimensional scale characterized by six major dimensions. These are “Registration,”; “Product Listing”; “Pricing Autonomy”; “Ease of Pick-up and Delivery”; “Credit of Receivables” and “Vendor Assistance.” A proper emphasis to continually improve upon these dimensions by the e-commerce platforms is expected to enhance the utility and overall experience of vendors from such platforms. Existence of a mutually beneficial relationship between vendors and online marketplaces will help marketplaces to mitigate concerns like nonfulfillment of orders and dispatch of substandard products.
Originality/value
Sustainable long-term relations between vendors and online marketplaces hold the key for such marketplaces to render error-free and delightful service on each individual order received. Seller experience of registering and operating on such e-marketplaces inspite of playing a defining role in vendor–marketplace relations has received scant attention of researchers, both in academia and industry till date. The present research is a seminal attempt to address this gap in marketing literature and offer additional know-how.
Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that utilises social media to facilitate interaction between sellers and consumers. Over the last number of years, the subject of social commerce has attracted significant attention from many researchers as they attempt to understand the factors affecting its adoption by consumers. A review of results from existing studies suggests inconsistent results for many relationships. Hence, this research has conducted a meta-analysis of 65 studies and synthesized the findings from existing studies in order to estimate the cumulative correlation coefficient (β) and significance (p). The investigation found that behavioural intention, trust, perceived usefulness, and social support are frequently examined dependent variables, that are strongly influenced by a number of independent variables. The findings in this study suggests that perceived usefulness, hedonic value, social commerce constructs, subjective norms, informational and emotional support are important for encouraging social commerce adoption. This research highlights various antecedents that have been theoretically examined in different social commerce studies that explore the effect size through meta-analysis.
Social commerce is an emerging platform that entails different social features to attract the attention of online consumers. Borrowing insights from the psychological contract theory, this study examines the characteristics of social commerce platforms, such as platform interactivity and rating and reviews that influence the consumers’ purchase intentions. An online survey of 430 consumers was conducted on a popular social commerce site in China. Partial least squares structural equation modeling and fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis techniques are used to analyze this mediation model. The results reveal the positive relationships between (1) psychological contract and purchase intention; (2) platform interactivity and relational contract; and (3) rating and reviews and transactional contract. Besides, partial mediating effects of the relational contract, on the relationship between platform interactivity and purchase intention, and transactional contract, on the relationship between rating and reviews and purchase intention, are also observed. Moreover, fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis validates the robustness of platform characteristics with psychological contracts and purchase intentions. Overall findings suggest that the platform characteristics have the potential to transform consumers’ purchase intentions through psychological contracts. The study provides new insights on consumers' behavior in social commerce milieus, along with its theoretical and practical implications.
This article describes a Comma Separated Values (CSV) dataset consisting of 7050 Facebook posts of various types (text, deferred and live videos, images). These posts were extracted from the Facebook pages of 10 Thai fashion and cosmetics retail sellers from March 2012, to June 2018. The dataset was collected via the Facebook API, and anonymized in compliance with the Facebook Platform Policy for Developers [1]. For each Facebook post, the dataset records the resulting engagement metrics comprising shares, comments, and emoji reactions within which we distinguish traditional “likes” from recently introduced emoji reactions, that are “love”, “wow”, “haha”, “sad” and “angry”. This dataset could serve as a basis for research on customer engagement with the novel sales channel that is Facebook Live, through comparative studies with other forms of content (text, deferred videos, and images), as well as the statistical analysis of the seasonality of engagement and outlier posts.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of two types of reciprocity (restricted reciprocity and generalized reciprocity) on customers’ trust in social commerce (s-commerce) and trust performance (purchase intention and word-of-mouth intention). Furthermore, this study examines how individual and contextual moderators (personal shopping experience and community shared language) could impact the trust development process.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adopted a survey method and obtained data from 287 users in a customer-to-customer (C2C) s-commerce platform. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the research hypotheses.
Findings
The results demonstrate that two types of reciprocity positively affect trust in s-commerce. Customers’ trust performance is significantly affected by trust in s-commerce. Additionally, shopping experience in s-commerce is found to positively moderate the relationship between restricted reciprocity and trust in s-commerce.
Research limitations/implications
The findings help to understand the nature and role of reciprocity in influencing trust and trust-related behaviors in the context of C2C s-commerce. The research also helps to explore the individual and contextual moderators that impact the effect of reciprocity on trust development.
Practical implications
The results offer a comprehensive view of trust building strategies for s-commerce practitioners, including shoppers, vendors and managers of s-commerce platforms.
Originality/value
This study is among the first few research studies that offers a theory-based conceptualization of reciprocity in C2C s-commerce and provides empirical support for the impact of reciprocity on customers’ trust in C2C s-commerce. In addition, this study devises a broader view of reciprocity based on restricted and generalized exchange principle to represent the interaction of vendor–shopper and shopper–shopper, respectively.
Purpose
Under the sunlight of social commerce, few concepts have blossomed like value co-creation. But when blurred strategies are implemented, the opportunity to wilt a brand is high. To avoid the miscues and the controversies, an ascendant step is to engage consumers with social commerce sites. The purpose of this paper is to propose three antecedents to engage consumers with social commerce sites, namely, social support, social commerce value and social commerce information sharing, and the effect of brand engagement on the intention of brand co-creation.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used survey data from 234 Iranians with experience using social commerce sites. Variance-based structural equation modeling using the partial least squares path modeling approach was adopted to analyze the structural model.
Findings
The authors found that social support, social commerce value and social commerce information sharing positively foster brand engagement. The study also revealed that brand engagement is a significant predictor of brand co-creation intention.
Originality/value
The study is the first study that considers and explains brand engagement from social support theory, social commerce value theory and social commerce information exchange. Also, the study shows how consumers can be an integral part of a brand. Unlike other studies which were done in industrialized countries, this study was employed in Iran.
Social commerce facilitates conversations among buyers across the world and enhances eWOM sharing. This paper investigates the key roles of online shoppers' culture (collectivism vs. individualism), and past experience as drivers of engagement with brand-related information sharing. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and consumer culture theory (CCT), a conceptual framework was developed and tested empirically. Data collected from a representative sample of online shoppers (N = 559) was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. Findings reveal that shoppers' experience is indirectly related to brand-related information sharing, and mediated by three TPB beliefs (attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavior control). These relationships were moderated by customer culture. The impact of attitude on information sharing was greater for collectivist shoppers, whereas the influence of subjective norms was stronger for individualist shoppers. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.
In the context of social commerce, the influence of culture on consumers’ behavior and attitude is more significant. This paper empirically analyzes the influence of social interaction (perceived risk, trust, and intimacy) on consumers’ purchase intention in social commerce, and the antecedent effect of cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism/collectivism) on social interaction is also explored. Data were collected in China and France from consumers who had prior online shopping experience on social commerce websites. The results show that the impact of perceived risk on subsequent purchase intention in social commerce will be transferred by trust and intimacy to a certain extent. The intimacy between users contributes to trust-building, and both of their positive impacts on purchase intention would show distinct effects in different cultures. Besides, cultural dimensions are proved to have a significant effect on users’ social interaction. Although high uncertainty avoidance brings perceived risk, it can promote subsequent trust-building. These findings help provide managerial insights for social commerce community to establish effective trust mechanism in a multicultural context.
Online citizen science platforms increasingly provide types of infrastructural support previously only available to organisationally-based professional scientists. Other practices, such as creative arts, also exploit the freedom and accessibility afforded by the World Wide Web to shift the professional-amateur relationship. This paper compares communities from these two areas to show that disparate practices can learn from each other to better understand their users and their technology needs. Three major areas are discussed: mutual acknowledgement, infrastructural support, and platform specialisation. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of differing practices, and lessons that can be learnt for online citizen science platforms.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of social commerce constructs (SCCs), social support and relationship quality on social commerce intentions, which lead to use behaviour of social networking sites for social commerce.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 343 users of social networking sites in Pakistan. The data analysis was conducted using PLS-SEM.
Findings
The results show that SCCs have empowered consumers through the existence of virtual groups, ratings and reviews and recommendations and referrals, thereby having a significant impact on social commerce intentions. The relationship quality with social networking sites, measured through commitment, satisfaction and trust, also proved to be a leading forecaster of social commerce intentions. The impact of social support could not positively influence the relationship quality with the social networking site. However, social support influences the social commerce intentions significantly.
Research limitations/implications
Future research should enrich model with some moderating variables and data may be collected from actual online shoppers only.
Practical implications
This study provides valuable insights to retailers to formulate their social commerce strategies as per decision factors results to have maximum engagement of consumers in social commerce.
Originality/value
The study proposes the unique model for finding the social commerce intentions and use behaviour using social support theory, relationship marketing theory and information systems literature.
There is increasing interest in the marketing discipline to adopt an institutional perspective when examining markets. This requires seeing markets as complex systems that evolve through time, rather than as preexisting, stable structures. Using a historical, longitudinal case study, we integrate the “institutional work” framework as a lens to understand the process of market change in the novel, historic case of circus in North America through the 20th century. We explore the decline of the market for traditional American circus, and the emergence, in the 1970s, of the adjacent market for new circus, with a specific focus on the world’s preeminent new circus company, Cirque du Soleil. Theoretical contributions of the article include a “market-shaping activities” framework that illustrates market shaping involves considerably more actors than the dyad of producer and consumer. Market-shaping occurs through an interdependent process involving institutionalized practices, beliefs and expectations, and the intentional activities of market actors at any institutional level. Market change is shared, iterative, and recursive, that is cocreated, and undertaken by market actors both formal and informal. Market shapers do not necessarily work in an orchestrated fashion; nevertheless, vibrant networks of complementary actors contribute positively to the construction of shared identities and normative networks. From a managerial perspective, we find implications for policy makers, funders, strategists, and marketers.
Inspired by Bauman’s notion of “liquidity,” we problematize the socio-cultural dynamics taking place in contemporary retail. The notion of liquid retail enables researchers to untangle marketplace transformation and to highlight developments centred around markets and market-actors that jointly transform each other. This introduction underlines, as a point of departure, recent developments in retailing that have been marked by the corrosion of fixity and boundaries. We provide a short synopsis of marketplace transformation and liquid retail, from a socio-cultural perspective, and summarize the papers included in this special issue.
Purpose
Social media remarkably changed the way of interaction between the consumers and organizations. The increased acceptance of social media has given rise to social commerce (s-commerce) and s-commerce usage is gradually increasing over the last few years. The progressive development of technologies suggests that s-commerce will become the mainstream for marketing and a literature survey indicates that there have not been many studies in this area. The purpose of this paper is to predict the factors influencing consumer intention towards the adoption of s-commerce.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a survey approach with reference to important behavioural factors such as satisfaction, ethics, trust, enjoyment/easiness, social pressure and awareness. The research model was developed to be in line with the available literature. The data were collected using a five-point Likert scale and the research model was tested using least square regression.
Findings
The results showed that user intention is significantly and positively related to perceived trust, enjoyment/easiness, social pressure, satisfaction and awareness. Also, “intention” was found to be a significant mediating factor for actual usage.
Research limitations/implications
First, the questionnaire was a “snap-shot” instead of longitudinal study. Second, future research should use other moderating variables that may affect the usage of social media. Also the study could apply a variant of research methods to include other techniques such as interviews, which allow for deeper understanding of the problem and issues.
Practical implications
Social media represents an important platform for electronic commerce and has one of the most metamorphic impacts on business. Therefore, investigating the usage of s-commerce with reference to important behavioural factors could provide valuable information for companies in establishing policies and strategies. It could also be useful for management studies and researchers in understanding the consumers’ attitude towards usage of social media for commercial purposes.
Social implications
S-commerce creates opportunities for firms. Based on findings this research provides insights with major implications for marketers, who would like to generate direct sales on social network platforms.
Originality/value
Existing literature focusses largely on the effectiveness of social media. Only a handful has endeavoured to analyse s-commerce systems and the literature on consumers’ behaviour in using s-commerce is not mature yet. This study is one of the few studies in this field, and aims to predict and explain the user acceptance of social media for commercial purposes.
Social commerce is an emergent business model where user-generated content is a valuable source of information that minimises the risk and ambiguity surrounding online purchase decisions. This study examines the user-generated content represented by reviews and recommendations (electronic word of mouth or eWOM) by contrasting customer (peer) vs. authority (expert) generated eWOM, from a product buying criteria perspective. Using five consumer healthcare wearable products as a benchmark, customer reviews from Amazon.com were analysed and compared with expert reviews and recommendations from Consumer Reports using machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, logistic regression, multinomial naïve Bayes, random forest and support vector machines. The findings suggest that expert reviews and recommendations remain product-centric and are not attuned to shifts in customer buying patterns, thus missing out on important product context-based usage and evaluation criteria such as operational, personal, and environmental. Considering these results, the authors discuss implications for managers and researchers, and future research directions.
Digital entrepreneurship possesses immense societal implications beyond its commercial significance. Yet our knowledge of the emancipatory potential of digital entrepreneurship remains limited because few studies have gone beyond the conventional emphasis on profits and wealth creation. Drawing on the emancipatory perspective that views entrepreneurship as change creation through the removal of constraints, this article examines how emancipation can occur through the actions of digital entrepreneurs. Using an empirical investigation of entrepreneurial endeavours set against disadvantaged communities in Indonesia, we uncover constraints facing a developing economy and the role of digital technologies in ameliorating them. Through extensive fieldwork and in-depth case study analyses, we identify constraining societal norms and restrictive practices, as well as the three forms of digital enablement - to emulate services, aggregate capital and equalise opportunities – necessary for the enactment of digitally enabled emancipation. We present a framework to illustrate the enactment of emancipatory digital entrepreneurship for the inclusive development of businesses and communities.
Web 2.0 applications and social media have transformed e-commerce into a new business paradigm, which is called social commerce. This development has changed the customers’ role and has empowered them by placing them in a unique position for influencing other buyers and providing guidance in purchasing decisions. Although a substantial amount of research has been conducted on customer behaviour, the understanding of the factors that influence customer engagement behaviour is limited, particularly in the social commerce context. This limitation is due to a lack of theoretical models for explaining such behaviour. In this study, the important factors that drive customer engagement on social commerce platforms are extracted from the literature. Drawing from social support theory, social presence theory, uses and gratifications theory, and the information system success model, we propose a new model for social commerce customer engagement. A survey-based empirical study with 203 respondents was conducted. The results demonstrated that customer engagement behaviour is strongly determined by social interaction, technological factors (interactivity and system quality), and motivational factors (hedonic and utilitarian motivations and perceived value). Among these factors, perceived value and social interaction had the most significant impacts on customer engagement behaviour on social commerce platforms. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
The growing popularity of social commerce may transform the purchase behaviour of consumers. It is the need of time to investigate the factors that impact the consumers’ purchase intention in the social commerce environment, especially in a developing country like Pakistan. The study is a drive to investigate the factors influencing the purchase intentions of consumers in social commerce. By employing social learning theory, this study proposed a theoretical model to explore the factors affecting consumers’ purchase intention and decision making. A structured questionnaire-based survey was conducted for data collection, and 232 valid responses were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) to validate the proposed research model. The results of the study concluded that social commerce constructs in the form of learning from forums and communities, learning from ratings and reviews, and learning from social advertisements were significant predictors of social support constructs. Furthermore, social support constructs such as emotional and informational support significantly contribute to predicting consumer’s purchase intentions in social networking sites. In addition, this study revealed that special focus was needed to build social commerce constructs and social support by the managers of social commerce sites to attain consumers’ purchase intention.
This paper proposes a novel form of partnering between business education tutors and students as autonomous learners, conceptualised as technologized situated partnering practice (TSPP). Relying on business students’ narratives, we explain how TSPP allows the maintenance of student engagement in an environment that is heavily saturated with technologies. We show that while being engaged with technology, business students consider tutors as learning partners which allows them to valorise lifelong learning by contextualizing, reinventing and problematising their daily activities in a situated partnering practice they co-construct with tutors. We also show that the dynamics of TSPP can be leveraged by tutors, if the latter appreciate the dynamic of students’ learning processes and leverage interobjective (i.e. shared and overarching) representations of technology in use. We discuss the implications for tutor-student partnering practice and for the tutors’ reliance on technology to foster teaching and learning practices that have transformative effects.
This study aims to reveal the mechanism of how consumers’ engagement is established in social commerce communities. Building upon social support theory, we propose models and employ datasets obtained from Douban.com to empirically investigate the different effects of emotional and informational support on consumers’ engagement and how involvement mediates these relationships in the social commerce context. At the same time, the moderating role of product presentation is examined to help clarify the impact of social support and consumer involvement. Our analyses reveal that the two subdimensions of social supportive information are positively related to consumer involvement, together promoting consumers’ engagement in the community. In particular, involvement imposes a full mediating influence on emotional support but a partial mediating impact on informational support. Product presentation strengthens the effects in that the predictive effect of determinants on engagement is more pronounced for books with electronic versions in the social commerce community. For researchers and managers, these findings emphasize the benefits of the social commerce community, particularly with regard to Douban.com in China.
Purpose
Online Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platforms are becoming increasingly popular globally in recent years. Our knowledge of how to develop and manage the digital platforms that make P2P lending possible, however, is limited. Through an in-depth examination of the strategies deployed and actions taken across the various stages of development of Tuodao, one of the most successful online P2P lending platforms in China, the purpose of this study is to develop a process model of P2P Lending Platform Development to address this knowledge gap.
Design/methodology/approach
The case research method was adopted for this research, and a total of 16 informants were interviewed. The informants were composed of representatives of Tuodao’stop management, organizational IT functions as well as its various business units.
Findings
Our study reveals that the development of a P2P lending platform can unfold in a specific sequence across three stages, and the development of a particular side of the platform should be emphasized in each stage (i.e. Partners, followed by Lenders, and then Borrowers). Each stage is also distinctive in terms of their strategies and platform configuration outcomes, which are elaborated on in our paper.
Originality/value
Our process model contributes an in-depth view of how P2P lending platforms should be established and nurtured to complement the existing studies in this rapidly growing research area. In addition, our study also hints at the strategies that can facilitate the various stages. Our model can potentially serve as the foundation for formulating guidelines for the managers of P2P lending platforms, so that they are able to optimize the development of their platforms and extend the benefits of P2P lending to a broader base of customers.
Social commerce has gained substantial attention from both academics and practitioners. Many studies aim to understand consumer behavior in social commerce. However, little attempt has been made to investigate the social commerce phenomenon from the seller’s perspective. Focusing on sellers, this study explores the drivers of seller creative selling and empirically tests the effect of seller creative selling on seller business performance in social commerce settings. Using multi-sourced data, including primary survey data and secondary trade volume data from a large social commerce marketplace, the authors find that seller creative selling significantly enhances seller business performance. Further, community information support from other users on the marketplace, and business support from the marketplace platform, contribute to sellers’ creative selling behavior. In addition, seller tenure with the marketplace weakens the positive relationship between community information support and seller creative selling. These findings highlight the key role of seller creative selling for successful social commerce platforms and provide guidance for nurturing seller creative selling by managers of such websites.
With the rise of social commerce, new approaches such as sharing commerce in which the consumers, businesses and other stakeholders collaboratively perform various commercial activities and business interactions. Research relevant to information sharing activities in social commerce, the influence of trust on consumer behaviour, and intention to buy have been increasing in the past few years. However, most of the studies considered trust in a single dimension and its association with social, commercial, and technology factors. Investigating trust in the context of sharing commerce, a relatively new concept emerging in the recent years has been under researched. Focusing on this aspect, this study investigates the influence of trust in sharing commerce, social commerce information sharing, and perceived privacy risk on the intention to buy using a conceptual model reflecting the relationship between these constructs. Data was collected using an online questionnaire aimed at consumers from emerging markets in Asia through emails, and the data is analysed using PLS-SEM techniques. The results indicated that social commerce information sharing activities increases the trust in sharing commerce platforms and reduces perceived privacy risk, which can significantly improve the decision-making process and the intention to buy. This study demonstrates the link between social commerce information sharing, trust, perceived privacy risk, and intention to buy, and highlights the need to consider these constructs in social commerce research in emerging markets.
Live streaming has recently become a popular direct selling channel which offers small, self-employed sellers unseen levels of consumer interaction and engagement. While the extant research focused on consumer motivation and intention to shop via live streaming, little is known from the seller’s perspective. Indeed, the potential advantages of live streaming commerce are accessible to everyone, but sellers experience different levels of success with this medium. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, this study analyses Facebook data of live streaming sellers to assess the nature and extent of engagement metrics, and delineate the dynamic, interactive live streaming sales process. We identify four sales approaches and twelve strategies adopted in acquiring and retaining customers. This typology of sales approach representing seller-focused antecedents is mapped against relationship process and outcomes to provide a framework for understanding relationship mechanisms in live streaming commerce.
This study develops a trust mechanism based on trust transfer theory in the context of customer-to-customer (C2C) social commerce. Based on combined data from 206 sellers and consumers, this study finds that customers have continuous purchase intentions when they trust sellers and brands at the same time and that consumers generate brand trust due to trust in sellers. In addition, with informational and emotional support, consumers can generate trust in individual sellers. Finally, promotion, which is a common strategy used by C2C sellers, will damage the trust transfer from sellers to the brand.
This paper provides a Systematic Literature Review (‘SLR’) of the emerging ‘entrepreneurship-as-practice’ (EaP) research field. It advances EaP as a ‘platform of expression’ that enriches entrepreneurship research. Following the ‘practice turn’ in social sciences, entrepreneurship is also interested in this new approach. The goal of this article is to map and critically review the literature within the EaP field. The Systematic Literature Review returned 76 articles contributing closely to EaP. Beyond descriptive analytics, results highlight the main research topics of EaP stream as well as multiple methodologies that connect researchers and participants through various research practices. The paper identifies a spectrum of seven theoretical frameworks underlying EaP studies and puts forward examples of research and empirical contexts to provoke the entrepreneurship research community to study actual practices in their diversity. Lastly, the authors detail in five propositions the promising avenues for future research opened by EaP.
Website stickiness, which describes how much attention a website receives from its users, is a critical success factor for e-commerce websites. While many e-commerce websites are currently integrating social commerce features to enhance consumers’ shopping experience, little is known about how such features affect the website stickiness, especially when used in combination. Building upon the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R)paradigm, we develop a research model to explain how social commerce feature richness affects the website stickiness through consumers’ perception of cognitive and affective factors. The research model is evaluated in a controlled online experiment, in which 164 participants used variants of an e-commerce website with varying levels of social commerce feature richness. The results indicate that the feature richness positively affects cognitive and affective factors, which in turn increase the website stickiness. This implies that e-commerce websites can be made more successful when using functionally diverse social commerce features in combination.
The aim of this paper is to explore, conceptualize, and critically discuss how the temporary retail site of the pop-up store works towards inciting consumers to buy products which have previously been discarded. Drawing on, and developing, the concept of the retailscape, we use empirical material from an ethnographic study to show how the temporal retailscape of the pop-up store is assembled, and how it shapes shopping practice. The spatial organization of these stores, their ephemeral nature, the limited product availability, and the unconventional spatial organization enable what we term frenzy shopping-a distinct mode of emotionally-intensive shopping whereby previously established shopping norms and rules of conduct are temporarily suspended.
While research into customer engagement receives much attention, few studies have examined why consumers engage in social commerce and the resulting consequences for companies. This study explores the influence of social support and community factors on customer engagement and the subsequent effects on customer loyalty toward social commerce websites. We propose a model to investigate the differences between the influence of social support and three community factors (community drivenness, community identification and community trust) on customer engagement, and the impact of customer engagement on four customer loyalty dimensions, one transactional (repurchase intention) and three non-transactional (willingness to co-create, stickiness intention and positive eWOM intention). We conducted a survey and collected data from 437 users of Facebook social commerce websites. The findings show that customer engagement is a key predictor of the four dimensions of customer loyalty toward social commerce websites. In addition, the results indicate that social support and two community factors significantly affect customer engagement. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications. Full text available at https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1atYe_G-sG0skW
Social commerce platforms have gained prominence in e-commerce, as social media has become an integral part of users’ online activities. Therefore, firms have been either developing or utilizing social commerce platforms to increase user engagement by adding social shopping facility onto their electronic commerce platforms. However, managing user engagement and user interaction becomes complex when e-commerce platforms are transformed into social commerce platforms. In this study, we operationalize four distinct stages of the social commerce platform, namely, social identification, social interaction, social shopping, and transaction based on salience theory. Using clickstream data, we empirically measure user engagement in these four states by modeling users’ incidence and time spent. Drawing from the PageRank algorithm, we capture the importance of ranking and distance on user engagement. The model also accounts for the effects of situational variables such as weekend; holiday; time of day; and user characteristics, such as gender and social media setting. Our results suggest that ranking and distance have significant effects on users’ incidence as well as time spent on social commerce platforms. The insights from this study can be helpful in designing the social commerce platform effectively using only the customers’ path navigational clickstream data from the parent social commerce platform.
Behavioral intention toward social commerce has been explained mainly by consumers’ pursuit of utilitarian and
economic value. However, in this paper, we show that consumers can be drawn to social commerce primarily for
the pursuit of social value. Based on quantitative data from 193 university students, we found the pursuit of
socialization, not usefulness or value, was the main driver for consumers’ behavioral intention toward social
commerce services. The results of this study demonstrate social commerce as a vehicle for social value in the
form of social capital gains and social engagement. This presents a new use of social commerce and shifts away
from understanding it solely as a vehicle for functional or economic 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.
The wide popularity and rapid growth of social commerce have opened a new arena for business and grand opportunities for Information Systems (IS) research. However, there is only a limited theoretical understanding of and even less substantive empirical grounding on how social media technologies, providers, and customers interact to achieve social commerce initiatives and opportunities. This study integrates the service-dominant (S-D) logic and customer-dominant (C-D) logic perspectives and both streams of service marketing and IS usage literature, and proposes a unified framework outlining key qualities and dimensions of social commerce and their interactions. We tested the framework with a large set of field survey data of 1250 social commerce customers. The results show that each of the proposed dimensions captures a unique prominent aspect of social commerce; the multi-dimensions combine to define the underlying structural nature and process of social commerce. Furthermore, the testing of the model validated the hypothesized interactive relationships of key social commerce qualities. The unified view contributes to IS research in general and social commerce innovations, and provides managerial implications for understanding the overall interactions of social commerce.
【Full-text available on request】The rapid growth and increasing convergence of social networking and e-commerce open up a new era of social commerce, wherein people are encouraged to engage in various social interactions that are conducive to commercial activities. However, current studies are limited in investigating the concept of social commerce engagement and the processes through which social commerce engagement is established. Drawing upon interpersonal attraction theory and relationship management perspective, this study proposes a research model to address the influences of technology attractiveness, which is composed of task, social, and physical attractiveness, on social commerce involvement and engagement. Considering that social interactions in social commerce community are often stimulated by users’ common interests in products and consumption activities, the moderating role of personal interest is further examined by applying personality literature to reveal how technology attractiveness and community involvement take effect in the social commerce context. Empirical results indicate that all the three aspects of technology attractiveness (i.e., task, social, and physical attractiveness) are positively associated with community involvement, which in turn affects social commerce engagement. In particular, involvement fully mediates the impact of physical attractiveness and partially mediates the effects of task and social attractiveness. Personal interest enhances the effect of social attractiveness, whereas it weakens the effect of physical attractiveness on community involvement. Personal interest also strengthens the positive relationship between community involvement and social commerce engagement. Findings emerged from this study will contribute to the current understanding of how social commerce engagement is formed and help practitioners improve community attractiveness and deliver differential attractiveness to users with different levels of personal interest.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compare the relative impacts of trust and risk on individual’s transaction intention in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-marketplaces from both the buyers’ and the sellers’ perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach
Two surveys were used to collect data regarding buyers’ and sellers’ perceptions and transaction intentions at a typical C2C e-marketplace. Partial least squares was used to analyze the data. A complementary qualitative study was conducted to triangulate the results from the quantitative study.
Findings
Institution-based trust (IBT) exerts a stronger influence on transaction intentions for buyers than for sellers. Sellers perceive a stronger impact of trust in intermediary (TII) than buyers on transaction intentions. The impacts of perceived risk in transactions are not different between buyers and sellers. Furthermore, IBT mediates the impacts of TII and perceived risk on transaction intentions for buyers.
Research limitations/implications
The results indicate that the impacts of trust and risk on transaction intention in e-marketplaces do differ between buyers and sellers. This suggests a need to further investigate the buyer–seller difference in online transactions.
Practical implications
Intermediaries need to focus on different types of trust-building mechanisms when attracting buyers and sellers to make transactions in the e-marketplace.
Originality/value
C2C e-marketplaces cannot survive without participation from both buyers and sellers. Most prior research is conducted from the buyers’ perspective. This research sets a starting point for future research to further explore the differences between buyers’ and sellers’ behavior in C2C e-commerce environments.
The present article, which opens this special issue, focuses on unconventional forms of entrepreneurship not captured sufficiently by current theory. Changes in society and escalating economic difficulties have led to a mutation in entrepreneurship, driven less by conventional professional interest and more by passion, a new paradigm that in turn has opened the door to an unconventional approach to entrepreneurship. We here seek to discern the main elements that help define the unconventional entrepreneur, including 1) the role that passion plays, notably in the pursuit of leisure and adventure; 2) the important role of tribes before, during, and after entrepreneurial creation; and 3) liquid society as a cause of the identity crisis and a factor of the quest for entrepreneurial recognition. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of this unconventional entrepreneur being part of a type of governmentality as a perfect example of neoliberal alienation.
Social commerce contributes multi-disciplinary knowledge concerning psychology, sociology, computer science, and marketing in business. Its development complicated due to various fields involved that range from arithmetic patterns to marketing management. In this study, we conduct a systematic review of social commerce research by synthesizing 407 papers from academic publications between 2006 and 2017. This study focuses on three overarching questions: (1) What is current social commerce research? (2) Which research methods have been used in social commerce? (3) What are some potential areas for social commerce research in the future? We delineate the various facets of social commerce – definitions, differences, types and technologies, challenges and benefits, models and frameworks – in an all-encompassing taxonomy that enables us to answering the first question. To solve the second question, we applied different methods and techniques. Finally, we offer guidelines on the directions for future research, and intend that this work will serve as a roadmap for understanding the research literature within the field of social commerce.
We propose a more explicit role for abductive reasoning, or the development of initial explanation, in hypothetico-deductive (H-D) inquiry. We begin by describing the roots of abduction in pragmatism and its role in exploration and discovery. Recognizing that pragmatism treats abductive reasoning as inevitable, we argue that it can also be a deliberate form of reasoning in scientific inquiry, articulating the unique place it can have in hypothetico-deductive theorizing. We explain the opportunities from surfacing abductive reasoning in H-D where it already exists; from explicitly acknowledging abductive reasoning as a complement in building logical chains in H-D; and from using abductive reasoning as a substitute for H-D logic when a body of knowledge exhibits inconsistent, contradictory, or discrepant results. We elaborate strategies for data search and selection, data production and compilation, and analytical corroboration. Our overall argument is that the deliberate use of abductive reasoning in hypothetico-deductive projects has distinct advantages stemming from an explicitly tight connection between data and theory. We end by explaining the benefits of actively recognizing the role of abductive reasoning in organizational and management theorizing.
The article was written and prepared by the U.S. goverenment employee(s) on official time and is therefore in the public domain.
Social Networking Services (SNSs) allow individuals and small online retailers to engage in consumer-to-consumer social commerce (C2C s-commerce). It is a growing phenomenon in Thailand. This article seeks to articulate the driving forces behind the massive growth of C2C s-commerce in Thailand. Our preliminary literature review and observation reveal a set of interrelated drivers or dimensions fueling this growth: personality and motivation, user-generated content, ICT, and virtual community management. We postulate that these drivers are the main building blocks for C2C s-commerce adoption in Thailand. Researchers and practitioners can refer to these dimensions as they seek to reexamine C2C s-commerce in the context of Thailand or other emerging economies.Keywords: consumer-to-consumer (C2C), s-commerce, driving forces, Facebook, motivation, personality, social networking sites, social commerce, virtual community
Guided by Nickel's (2009) model of risk assessment and the literature on facial trustworthiness, this study investigates how the stake of a transaction interacts with information on buyers' profiles in influencing buyers' purchase decisions and information processing. Participants played buyers in a trust game and made purchase decisions based on a series of seller profiles while their eye movements on the stimuli were recorded. Results revealed that the three factors examined exerted influences on buyers' decision-making in a hierarchical fashion: Sellers' reputation exerted a primary influence on buyers' decision-making, followed by sellers' profile photos, which is further followed by the stake of a transaction. The results confirm Nickel's (2009) model of risk assessment and inform e-marketing strategies in terms of building consumers' trust.
In recent years, businesses are paying increasing attention to how to conduct commercial activities on social networking sites (SNS). This has also made social commerce an important issue for both scholars and practitioners. The aim of this study is to use the Model of Goal-Directed Behavior (MGB) as a theoretical foundation to empirically explore the role of social desire and commercial desire in driving users’ social sharing and social shopping intentions on SNS as well as the antecedents to these two types of desires based on different goals of using social commerce. The results indicated that individuals tend to have a weaker desire to engage in commercial activities than to engage in social activities on SNS. However, compared to social desire, commercial desire is more influential to social sharing and social shopping intentions on SNS. Notably, the factors driving social desire and commercial desire may vary by goals of using social commerce. The results revealed that social-oriented factors, including anticipated positive emotion for social activities and perceived behavioral control for social activities, drive individuals to have a desire to engage in social activities on SNS. In contrast, commercial-oriented factors, including perceived behavioral control for commercial activities, anticipated positive emotion for commercial activities, and commercial attitude, are important drivers of commercial desire. The results also showed that social identity cannot arouse users’ social and commercial desires on SNS. Finally, theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.
This study explores the development of a new form of social commerce in emerging markets from three interlocking aspects, namely, social (trust and familiarity), technical (governing form factor and technological utility), and socio-technical (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and word of mouth). As social commerce is proliferating and evolving across many emerging markets, we explore how these above-stated constructs manifest themselves in these markets. Our findings show the importance of governing form factors such as mobile system in the development of social commerce in emerging markets. Furthermore, familiarity and trust play a major role in mediating exchange between sellers and buyers and its positive effects in buyers’ perceived usefulness of each social commerce platform. Finally, Word of Mouth plays a vital role in building trust and helps in increasing buyer propensity and intention to search for products on these social commerce platforms.
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.
The purpose of this paper is to further develop the general program of managing overflows by attending to the managing of leaks. Specifically, the paper explores efforts to manage the problem of shoplifting in US grocery retailing during the period 1922–1969. The study identifies three different yet interrelated ways of managing leaks: identifying, preventing, and caulking leaks. Each of these rests on a combination of skills and devices as well as on efforts to align with the other ways of managing leaks and routinize them as part of ordinary retail operations. By providing an analysis of leaks management the paper proposes a theoretical and empirical complement to the research program on managing overflows, which has previously primarily focused on overflows in the sense of excess, surplus and abundance.
The aim of this paper is to explore, illustrate and conceptualise how the introduction of mobile phones transforms the practice of shopping. Drawing on a focus group study of young adults and making use of Practice Theory, this paper shows that the introduction of mobile phones reconfigures the practice of shopping subsequently transforming the agency of consumers. Mobile phones enable consumers to access, store, and process information in new ways; supporting new modes of social shopping, enabling consumers to change the experience of shopping, and making them better equipped economic actors with more access to financial systems and new calculative capacities. While this new agency is beneficial to consumers, it also causes them stress and anxiety.
The increased popularity of social networking sites, such as Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter, has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce, often referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves using Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. Social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. This could become one of the most challenging research arenas in the coming decade. The purpose of this introduction is to present a framework that integrates several elements in social commerce research and to summarize the papers included in this special issue. The framework includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The proposed framework is valuable in defining the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. We also explain how the papers included in this special issue fit into the proposed research framework.