The Study Of Factors That Impact Online Shopping Intention On Social Network Sites

The registered users of Social Network Sites (SNS) are increasing very fast in recent years. It's reported that from 2006, the number of global SNS users keep growing 93% per year in average. The most successful SNS Facebook, its registered users have exceeded 500 million in only 6 years, even Google, last legend in cyber world, can't compete with this speed. But due to not willing to rely too much on advertising income, the whole SNS industry is still struggling to find a new model to get stable profit, and now SNS industry is trapped in a bottle neck. Meanwhile, the scale of online shopping is getting larger and larger. We all know the key to success for online shopping websites is to attract more and more consumers.Big SNS already have good customer base and brand prestige. So we can expect that if we can find an appropriate method, it will cost only a little investment to attract a big number of potential online consumers by SNS. Based on above analysis, this study figures that combining SNS with online shopping, specifically adding shopping application on SNS network platform, will form a very good profit model.From this point of view, this study divided all online shopping commodities that can be sold on SNS in China into two sorts: real commodities and virtual commodities, and then based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which is the classical model for consuming action study, designed two models for these two sorts to predict consumers'purchase intention. There are two important variables in TAM: Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use, in addition of these two, this study induced 7 new variables from Theory of Reasoned Action and other studies about consuming action and online shopping. In this study, we assume that consumers'intention to buy real and virtual commodities are determined by 10 variables: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment, Perceived Safety, Perceived Fitness, Subjective Norm, SNS Experience, Online Shopping Experience, Gender, Age. By processing empirical research towards 176 students in a university, this study find that consumers'intention to purchase real commodities on SNS is positively associated with Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Safety and Perceived Fitness, and negatively associated with consumers'age. On the other hand, consumers'intention to purchase real commodities on SNS is positively associated with Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment, Perceived Fitness, Subjective Norm and the number of female consumers.Then, this study applied the new model to analyze the shopping application of Renren.com, which is the biggest SNS in China. By doing so, this study finds that Renren.com performed very well in selling virtual commodities, but not that successful when operating shopping application of real commodities. Finally, this study provided some advices according to the new model, intending to improve Renren's real commodities shopping application.