A Study On Driving Factors Of Users’ Purchase Intention For Social E-Commerce Website

Internet has been widely used in people’s daily life in recent years, which, in turn, contributes to the emergence of mobile and fragmented trend of consumers’online shopping behavior. On the other side, the prosperous development of social media results in the occurrence of social e-commerce which is the combined product of social media and e-commerce and gradually comes into people’s life. Recently, social e-commerce has become one of the hotly discussed topics. Earnings of social e-commerce website arise mainly from commission revenue and advertising revenue. Both kinds of revenue are closely related with users’purchase quantity which is decided by their purchase intention. In other words, users’ purchase intention plays an important role in the earnings of social e-commerce website. This thesis, setting basic characteristics of social e-commerce website as an anchor point, tries to explore the relationship between characteristics of social e-commerce website and its users’purchase intention from the perspective of consumers’perception.Results show that social e-commerce website has three main characteristics, including sociability, commodity feature and system feature. What’s more, these three characteristics are positively related with users’ purchase intention. Among them, sociability is divided into two dimensions, namely, interaction and sense of belonging; commodity feature includes commodity price and commodity property; while system feature contains information quality and security. In addition, we also find that all these three characteristics positively affect users’purchase intention by enhancing users’ perceived value. Moreover, community scale of social e-commerce website has an negative moderating effect on the relationship between sociability or system feature and users’purchase intention. In specific, the larger the community scale, the smaller impact sociability and system feature of social e-commerce website has respectively on users’perceived value and vice versa. However, the moderating effect of community scale on the relationship between commodity feature and users’purchase intention is not significant. Based on the above research results, this thesis also puts forward some suggestions on the operation of social e-commerce website, aiming to help social e-commerce promote users’purchase intention and thus improving its earnings.