Trust Transfer And Consumer Behavior Intentions In Social Commerce

Social Commerce (SC) is an emerging e-commerce subset mediated by social media, which has gained explosive growth and remarkable popularity. Different from the traditional e-marketplace of e-commerce, the most prominent advancement of SC lies in that the social networks entailed by social media technology pull trust and support relationships to assist consumers in making decisions. And trust structure in SC is different from the traditional e-commerce by including the social trust with the traditional seller trust. These unique issues of SC have gradually attracted the interests of both practioners and scholars, trying to explore solutions to make use of the pulling power of social network support to enhance consumer trust and social commerce intentions.Trust is essential to the development of e-commerce, which has been advocated by the traditional theory of trust and moreover lots of researchers has confirmed the positive effect of trust on consumer decision-making empirically in the setting of e-commerce. While there exists some limitations when applying the traditional theory and ideas of trust to the new setting of SC:1) The driving mechanism of the new trust structure, social trust, is not clearly investigated; 2) the relationship of the integrated trust structure and social commerce intentions need further explanations. These problems become paramount because SC is founded on the basis of social networks, therefore it is urgent and necessary to address solutions for the issues abovementioned. Based on this, the view of social support which is based on social networks and relations is appropriate to fill the gap.This study has focused on the above research gaps, studying the relationship between Social Support, Trust in SC and Social Commerce Intentions. In particular, integrating the social support theory, trust theory and consumer behavior studies, we has proposed the model of trust transfer and social commerce intentions in SC. After collecting data trough questionnaire research, the proposed model is empirically tested by PLS-SEM and the results showed that most hypotheses have been supported, specifically,1) social support (informational and emotional) are demonstrated to exert positive influence on social trust building; 2) It has been empirically proved that the trust structure of SC is made up of social trust and seller trust and is transferable, which is mediated by susceptibility; 3) Both social trust and seller trust in SC have direct effects on the social commerce intentions informational as well as transnationally.Finally, according to the results, we have discussed the theoretical and practical inspirations. The theoretical implications are mainly about the researches on social commerce, trust transfer, trust theory and studies, consumer behaviors. Practical implications benefit social commerce businesses by providing decision support for marketing strategies. In addition, summarizing the limitations of the study which needs to be refined in the future, we put forward the further research directions.