| With the rapid development of Internet technologies, people’s life has gradually entered the era of information technology and network. Social interactions and shopping activities have transferred from offline to online, yielding the boosting of social media and electronic commerce. Meanwhile, social commerce that integrates social media and e-commerce has become a new direction. It has attracted attention from both academic and business areas.Pinterest, founded in 2010, is the most representative social commerce website in foreign countries. Pinterest uses a new form called "waterfall flow" to show the contents of pictures. It is growing very fast in recent years and has absorbed a great number of web accesses (only less than Facebook and Youtube). In China, many companies including mogujie.com, meilishuo.com, and duitang.com are the representatives of the "social atlas+interest atlas" of shopping platforms. Currently, the value of mogujie.com has reached nearly $2 billion. Such shopping platforms show items in the form of social media, and use "social atlas+interest atlas" and other ways to improve user stickiness. Thus, they can stimulate users’willingness of purchase.Based on the above background as well as a literature review on perceived value, community trust, and purchase intention, in this paper we focus on the influence of user perceived value of social commerce on purchase intention. Particularly, we construct a user perceived value dimension model, a research model of perceived value model and community trust and purchase intention in the context of social commerce. Further, we propose nine research hypotheses. By surveying the users of mogujie.com, meilishuo.com, and duitang.com using questionnaire, we collect 230 valid questionnaires. Then, we use SPSS to conduct quantitative analysis on the proposed research model in terms of a number of metrics such as descriptive statistics, reliability test, validity test, factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis. The results show that:(1) Four dimensions of customer perceived values have positive impacts on community trust in social commerce; (2) Community trust has positive impacts on purchase intention in social commerce; (3) In social commerce, community trust plays a partial intermediary role in function values, information and entertainment values, and purchase intention. In addition, it plays a complete mediating role between social value and purchase intention.The study of this paper is helpful to reveal the relationship and mechanism between user-perceived value, community trust, and purchase intention within the context of social commerce. It enriches the researches on value theories, trust theories, and other related areas. In addition, it is expected to offer some referential values for the future development of social media, e-commerce, and social commerce. |
