Impact of Informational Social Support and Familiarity on Social Commerce Intention

Abstract

Due to the increased popularity of social networking sites, a new platform called social commerce has emerged. Social commerce facilitates online interactions and user contributions to assist them in conducting commercial transactions. In this paper, we explore and identify factors that affect the intention to adopt social commerce. This study develops a comprehensive social commerce framework that has five key variables: Reviews and recommendations on social networking sites, customer ratings on social networking sites, trust on social networking sites, brand familiarity, and social commerce platform familiarity. Data were obtained from a survey of 310 consumers and were analyzed using Partial Least Squares PLS. The results indicate that reviews and recommendations on social networking sites, customer ratings on social networking sites, trust on social networking sites, and brand familiarity have a positive and direct influence on social commerce intention, while social commerce platform familiarity is not significant. This study contributes to consumer behavior theory by applying predictors of intention to social commerce for traditional e-commerce sites. The results also help e-commerce practitioners to improve their use of social tools.