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1. Introduction
Consumers, at present, have the tendency to exchange their sentiments and encounters about products between each other, and this is alluded to as word of mouth (WOM) (Arndt, 1967). WOM, is the impact of somebody’s casual opinion about products and brands from his/her experience of using them (Sen and Lerman, 2007). Notably, the communication among buyers may happen physically or by separation, and because of its significance in marketing for quite some time, it has been referred to as a substitute to conventional communication tools and also has an exceedingly influential asset (Trusov et al., 2008). Moreover, the evolution of Web 2.0 has changed the Web into a social domain where consumers generate content and share it with others. This shared information is referred to as electronic word of mouth (eWOM) and can be defined as any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the internet (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004). eWOM can be created by both consumers and merchants. eWOM conversations among consumers in s-commerce often revolves around brands (Chu and Kim, 2011; Wolny and Mueller, 2013). Recent empirical studies have shown that social collaboration in the form of eWOM is an integral part of the social commerce (s-commerce) success story (Wang and Yu, 2015). A study conducted indicates that 61 per cent of consumers resort to eWOM before buying any product, and 80 per cent of consumers are only willing to purchase online after consulting online customers’ reviews (eMarketer, 2008). Because of these enormous potentials of eWOM, researchers are now showing great interest in eWOM, in which considerable amount of research relating to eWOM has been carried out (King et al., 2014).
Nowadays, electronic commerce (e-commerce) firms engage their customers in the social Web to obtain vital information on their products (Hajli et al., 2014). This engagement marks a paradigm shift from the existing business models, leading to what is now called s-commerce (Shanmugam et al., 2016). S-commerce is defined as a new stream in e-commerce in which social factors are the determinant of this phenomenon and consumers are empowered to generate content using social media...