The Antecedents And Mechanisms Of Consumers' Online Impulsive Purchasing In Social Commerce

As a new subset of e-commerce,social commerce has brought extensive changes to consumers' online purchasing behavior.In social commerce,consumers can search product-related information,share and recommend their favorite products and shopping experiences,and interact with sellers and other consumers.Impulse buying,as a common shopping behavior in social commerce,has begun to attract the attention of managers and scholars.Based on literature review,we identify two research gaps in the extant literature.First,few studies in the impulse buying research are guided by contextualized theoretical framework in social commerce.Second,as far as we known,few study in the impulse buying literature has focused on the impulse buying behavior in fans group in social commerce.Given that,this study aims to reveal the mechanisms and antecedents of consumers' impulse buying behavior in social commerce via the guidance of contextualized theoretical framework.In addition,we also investigate the impulse buying behavior in fans group and out of fans group in social commerce.The first study draws from social learning theory and develop a research model illustrating how social factors may impact consumers' impulsive buying.We identify the uncertainty of product and the observation of product sales,as the antecedents of observational learning,and the source credibility and the argument quality,as the antecedents of reinforcement learning.Based on a mix-method approach which includes a quantitative survey and qualitative semi structured interview,we find that 1)uncertainty of product and observation of product sales has a positive impact on discounting own information;2)observation of product sales has a positive impact on imitating others;3)source credibility and argument quality has a positive impact on perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity;4)discounting own information,imitating others,perceived diagnosticity,and perceived serendipity has a positive impact on urge to buy impulsively.The results explain 49%variance in urge to buy impulsively.This study contributes by emphasizing the impact of observational learning and reinforcement learning on impulsive buying in social commerce,extending social learning theory to online impulsive buying literature,and addressing the potential of social learning theory in online impulsive buying and consumer behavior in social commerce.The second study builds upon consumer socialization perspective and demonstrates how sellers can use social commerce to promote potential consumers to have the urge to buy impulsively.We operationalize the three dimensions of social capital as the antecedent,peer motivation as the process,and consumers' urge to buy impulsively as the outcome to develop the research model.We focus on the role of social capital which established in the fans group.Our research model is empirically validated by online questionnaire survey.The results show that all of the three dimensions of social capital are positively associated with peer motivation,and explain 38%variance in urge to buy impulsively.This study contributes by investigating the influence of social factors on impulse buying in the fans group,emphasizing the impact of social capital on impulsive buying,extending consumer socialization theory in impulsive buying literature,and addressing the potential of consumer socialization theory in online impulsive buying and consumer behavior in social commerce.The third study builds upon social influence theory.This study develops a tripartite model of online impulsive buying pertaining to three types of social influence process:compliance,identification,and internalization.To empirically validate the research model,we employ a mixed-method approach which includes a quantitative longitudinal survey and a qualitative interview in the same research inquiry.The results show that 1)imitating others,social identity and group norms has a positive impact on urge to buy impulsively;2)social norm and social frequency ha s positive impact on imitating others;3)intragroup communication,group familiarity and group homogeneity has a positive impact on social identity and group norms;4)high social identity will weaken the influence of imitating others on urge to buy impulsively,but will strengthen the influence of group norms on urge to buy impulsively.The research model explains 45%variance in urge to buy impulsively.This study contributes by emphasizing the different roles of different social factors within and outside the fans group,extending social influence theory to online impulsive buying literature,and addressing the potential of social influence theory in online impulsive buying and consumer behavior in social commerce.