The Empirical Study Of Impact Factors Of Users Purchasing Behavior Intention On Image Social Network Sites

The merging of social media brings opportunities to e-commerce industry nowadays. It enables, on one hand, consumers to rely on collective wisdom in making online purchasing decisions; on the other hand, online retailers to advertise and publicize themselves in accessing more targeted audience. Recently, a kind of visual social media-image SNS-appeared and penetrated rapidly. Due to its special characteristics of ’visual enjoyment’ and ’interest-based sociability’, image SNS provides consumers a more vivid feeling, changing the communication approach between consumers and retailers. The rocket increasing visitor volume and more venture capital support are proving that it is a popular trend to utilize image SNS doing e-commerce.Tough has gained a lot of attention from researchers and business people, image SNS is still in a developing stage that there is little theoretical and empirical studies to support its growth. Therefore, this study is aiming at discussing the impact factors of users’purchasing intention on image SNS, in order to offer both theoretical and empirical support.This study is based on TAM, which also fusing motivation model, trust theory and consumer behavior theory, and then proposing a hypothesis model with variables of Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Enjoyment (PE), Trust (T), Sociability (S) and users’ Behavioral Intention (BI). We collected171pieces of valid questionnaires to do the empirical study. It is found PU, PE and T has direct positive impact on BI, while PEOU and S impact BI via PU, PE and T indirectly.This study contributes theoretical and empirical study of impact factors users’ behavioral intention on image SNS, and also provides practical suggestions for image SNS operators and online retailers. Lastly, the limitations and propose directions for future study are given.