A Study On The Relationship Between Social Presence And Stickiness Intention In B2C E-tailers

Does the presence of others facilitate customer behavior? In social psychology, researches find that the presence of others sometimes facilitates performance, so does it in people's shopping, buying and consuming behavior. However, the Internet provides customers with more convenience, price, product range and access, simultaneously it deprives the direct social contact which is also equally important for decision making in customer's shopping and buying. The great challenge and potential opportunities which vendors in virtual settings are confronted with are attracting, retaining loyal customers and improving their stickiness ability. Recently, more and more researchers take their focus on the absence of customer's social presence, and discus the compensation effect for social clues from different point of view, whereas much of these researches are separate and tuneless, especially lacking the discussion and empirical research on facilitation mechanism of customer's social presence.Because of the intangibility dilemma of vendors in virtual settings in managerial practice and the gaps of related theory research, based on social facilitation theory, social impact theory, media equation theory, social presence theory, shopping motive theory and related literatures, a conceptual model of customer's social presence is constructed which explains the affection and cognition mechanism of virtually presented others influencing focal customer online shopping behavior. This dissertation follows with three tasks.Firstly, on the basis of literature review and depth interview, the dissertation defines the concept of social presence as the co-presence awareness of the other social actors accompanied by affective and cognitive engagement with the others in computer-mediated social spaces. The dissertation further specifies three dimensions of social presence: awareness social presence, affective social presence and cognitive social presence. Using the data of Internet customers, a reliable and valid three-dimension scale is developed.Secondly, based on social presence theory, TAM model, customer value theory, trust theory and online stickiness theory, the dissertation builds up a conceptual model, in which the three dimensions of social presence influence focal customer stickiness intention via utilitarian value, trust and hedonic value. And then the conceptual model is tested empirically. The results indicate that awareness social presence has positive effect on both utilitarian value and trust. Affective social presence has positive effect on both utilitarian value and hedonic value. Cognitive social presence has positive effect on both trust and hedonic value. The finding in this dissertation also clearly suggests that utilitarian value, trust and hedonic value are indeed full mediators, as hypothesized in the proposed conceptual model.Finally, this dissertation identifies and empirically susceptibility to normative influence and susceptibility to informational influence that may moderate relationships in the conceptual model. The results suggest that cognitive social presence has a positive impact on trust and hedonic value for those B2C customers with high susceptibility to normative influence, but affective social presence has a positive impact on hedonic value for those B2C customers with low susceptibility to normative influence. Cognitive social presence has a positive impact on trust and hedonic value, affective social presence also has a positive impact on utilitarian value for those B2C customers with high susceptibility to informational influence, but affective social presence has a positive impact on hedonic value for those B2C customers with low susceptibility to normative influence. By using FIMIX-PLS method, this dissertation also empirically tests unobserved heterogeneity in this conceptual model and the results suggest that actually there are two different groups in the sample of this research, which moderate the relationships between cognitive social presence, trust and hedonic value.The contributions of this dissertation as follows:(1) based on the Internet situation, literatures review and depth interview, this dissertation defines the concept of social presence and develops a scale reliable and valid multi-dimension using the data of B2C customers.(2) Based on social presence theory, TAM model, customer value theory, trust theory and online stickiness theory, this dissertation builds up and tests a conceptual model in which the three dimensions of social presence influence customer stickiness intention indirectly via utilitarian value, trust and hedonic value. This dissertation extends the studies on the drivers of customer stickiness intention.(3) This dissertation examinees the moderating effects of susceptibility to normative influence and susceptibility to informational influence between social presence and customer stickiness intention. Based on unobserved heterogeneity, This dissertation estimate path model relationships on the aggregate data level. Hence this dissertation establishes the meaning of social presence in Internet marketing, and will be important to researchers as they continually strive to understand and model customer online shopping behavior.