The Study On Customers’ Interaction Behavior In Social Commerce

The increased popularity of social media as an efficient tool for information dissemination and social sharing, has given rise to a new commercial model called social commerce. Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce. It primarily facilitates commercial activities on social media by leveraging mutually generated contents and connected networks. Recently, social commerce has become the hot topic in both academic and industry research areas, and customers’ behaviors in social commerce have received increased interest. However, the existing studies are still in the exploration phase which focus on customers’ behaviors of single mode. There lacks a thorough and integrated study on the customers’ social interaction behaviors in social commerce because of its being a new phenomenon. Thus, this paper aims to fill in this gap.According to the participants and platforms of social commerce, customers’ interaction behaviors include the interaction among customers, the interaction between customers and social commerce platforms, and the interaction between customers and firms. Based on the social commerce practices in China, four research questions are proposed, and then customers’ interaction behaviors, consisting of the share and request of commercial information, social shopping, continued use and value co-creation, are empirically investigated.First, given that the interaction behavior among customers as the basic participation behavior in social commerce is the foundation for the flourish of social commerce, this study provides initial insights for studying why customers share and request commercial information based on the stimulus-organism-response theory from environmental psychology. The results indicate that the intention to share and request commercial information is determined by social support, social presence and flow experiences. These experiences, in turn, are influenced by perceived interactivity, perceived personalization and perceived sociability features. Also, it can be inferred from post-hoc analysis that most of the path coefficients in Renren and SinaWeibo are significantly different.Second, based on the stimulus-organism-response paradigm and trust theory, this paper explains the influence of trust on the customer decision process from an integrative perspective of cognitive and emotional trust, and discovers the trust building mechanism based on the technological characteristics of the social shopping community. The results indicate that sociability and self reference features significantly influence cognitive and emotional trust, and in turn customers’ intention to purchase through the social shopping community.Third, this paper proposes a model of group-buying websites continuance based on expectation confirmation model, and investigates the antecedents of customer satisfaction and continuance intention from an integrative perspective of online group-buying characteristics and social influence. The results show that perceived website quality, perceived price, and confirmation are important determinants of customer satisfaction, while perceived website quality, perceived reputation, satisfaction and perceived critical mass significantly influence customers’continuance intention.Finally, the paper analyzes the motivation mechanism of customer participation in the co-creation of brand values from a perspective of customers’ co-creation experiences. The findings indicate that customers’ intention to participate in value co-creation in the future is determined by pragmatic, sociability and hedonic value experiences, namely, customer learning value, social integrative value, and hedonic value. These experiences, in turn, are influenced by task-relevant (TR) and affection-relevant (AR) cues. Further, AR cues moderate the relationships between TR cues and customer learning value, and between TR cues and social integrative value.