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1. Introduction
Social commerce platforms (SCPs) help consumers quickly evaluate products, services and tourism destinations, and many SCPs now offer transaction settlement. SCPs are essentially social media platforms with purchasing functionality and a connected supply chain. SCPs provide easy access to diagnostic information from non-vendor sources and aids consumers through the product evaluation and consumption cycle. We adopt the following definition of social commerce as “an activity that harnesses Web 2.O technologies/social media that supports sellers and buyers to interact, engage, collaborate, and create value that eventually leads to the intentions or actual decision making to shop for or acquire information about products and services” (Nadeem 2016, p. 13). As social media communities hosted on applications (e.g. Meta) evolve into commercial platforms, it remains important to continually measure consumer trust formation processes.
While a driving force behind traditional e-commerce growth was maximizing shopping efficiency via online product catalogs, advanced search, product recommendations, one-click buying and rapid delivery; the driving force behind current social commerce is community, sharing, socializing, networking and collaborating with a secondary focus on shopping (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). Community members typically help each other by sharing product consumption news, tips, experiences and perspective. Furthermore, SCPs provide vendors the ability to build community and strengthen brands (Nadeem et al., 2021a).Consumer interest in social commerce is evolving (Liu et al., 2022; Jia et al., 2022; Yang, 2021) as channels such as Instagram embed sponsored product offerings into community and personal Instagram shopping sites; however, it remains to be seen to what extent consumer adopt SCP purchasing, or prefer to rely on trusted e-commerce websites for e-purchases.
Especially when shopping for products, consumers enjoy SCP's ability to provide easy access to product, service, maintenance and destination information thereby increasing consumer engagement (Bilgihan et al., 2014), SCPs, for example, allow pre- and post-transaction activities, including searchable services and items, marketing and customer service, as well as additional shopping assistance such as product ratings, suggestions, reviews and payments (Lu et al., 2016). The theoretical descriptions and definitions of social commerce available in the relevant literature are presented in Appendix 1.
Social media apps (paired with smartphones) have improved shopping and ordering experiences for consumers and retailers alike (Hew et al., 2019;...