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1. Introduction
Social commerce is a new business model derived from the development of social networking and e-commerce, which promotes product sales and influences the purchasing behavior of users via an established network of social media and social networking sites (Sharma and Crossler, 2014; Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016) survey, nearly half (45 percent) of 22,618 digital buyers from the worldwide said that reading reviews, comments and feedback on social media influenced their digital shopping behavior. The global digital statistics reported by the Statista (2017), also show that 81 percent of Taiwanese users use social media, and the most popular social network was Facebook with an 83 percent penetration rate. As users become increasingly dependent on social media, e-commerce will increase in importance and experience further development. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook, has stated outright that social commerce will become the new trend in e-commerce (SocialTimes, 2011). As social commerce has developed, social media outlets have begun to set up new types of services, incorporating relevant shopping elements into their websites, such as the “buy button” on Facebook, and the dynamic commercial shopping links on YouTube. While such features enable users to acquire more relevant information, they also facilitate users’ shopping behaviors while watching commercials. Since we expect a large number of potential users will attempt to use social commerce, even though social commerce has not been completely developed in Taiwan, we believe this research is worth doing.
The strategy and management consulting firm formerly known as Booz & Company, predicted that the total global output value of social commerce in 2015 would top 30 billion USD (Booz & Company, 2011). Consequently, 52 percent of marketers believe the social commerce is one of the most important areas of investment, and Facebook is expected to reach almost 27 billion USD by the end of 2017 (API2CART, 2017). Nowadays, social networking websites provide not only a platform for social activities and information sharing, but also a virtual retail space in which users can develop new shopping methods and habits (Sharma and Crossler, 2014; Teh and Ahmed, 2011; Fue et al., 2009). Past e-commerce developments have been relatively rational, focusing on efficient delivery, innovative payment methods, increased product search speed, etc....