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ABSTRACT
The emergence of social commerce has brought substantial changes to both businesses and consumers. Amid this backdrop, understanding consumer behavior in social commerce contexts is critical to sellers that endeavor to more effectively influence consumers and capitalize on the power of social ties. With the technical features of social commerce website and the stimulus-organism-response paradigm as bases, this study develops a model to investigate the effects of technical features (interactivity, recommendations, and feedback) on relationship quality (swift guanxi and trust) and subsequent repurchase intention. Collecting 506 valid respondents of agricultural product consumers in social commerce, we utilized SmartPLS to conduct statistical analysis for the model. The empirical results indicate that interactivity, recommendations, and feedback exert positive effects on swift guanxi and trust to different degrees. In turn, swift guanxi and trust enable and mediate the prediction of consumer repurchase intention in social commerce context. The theoretical and pragmatic implications for firms in social commerce market are also provided.
Keywords: Social commerce; Interactivity; Recommendations; Feedback; Swift guanxi; Trust
1.Introduction
In recent years, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MicroBlog, and WeChat have progressively become an eminent strategic business distribution channel over the Internet. By June 2016, it is estimated that the number of Chinese online citizens has reached 710 million and that the users of MicroBlog and WeChat have reached 242 and 558 million, respectively [CNNIC 2016]. These figures mirror the ever-increasing prevalence of social media for organizations. With the distinct advantages presented by social networking sites, users have become more passionate about sharing commercial information and shopping online [Liang et al. 2011]. As such, online businesses can leverage these emerging technological platforms to establish and further solidify relationships with customers [Hajli 2014]. Through interactions with virtual community members, firms can access information that is valuable to the improvement of existing offerings and the development of new products [Fuller et al. 2006].
Social commerce, a term introduced by Yahoo in 2005, originated from the Internet company's Shoposphere service which combines community-based communication with word-of-mouth transmission. Social commerce pertains to the carrying out of business activities through social media. It is an extension of e-commerce and is facilitated by consumers' social interactions, which are established over social media [Kim and Park 2013]. The scope of...