The Impact Of Information Cues On Consumers' Search Experience And Purchase Decision

Social commerce is an Internet business model that combines social and business.Consumers are able to share experiences and reviews about products and services in social commerce,which can help consumers make comparison and evaluate before making their final purchase decision,so as to find products and services that meet their own needs and specific preference.However,the information in social commerce platform is tedious and intermingled,consumers' information search process is inefficient and not as expected,which make it difficult for them to make an ideal purchase decision.In response to the problems mentioned above,this study observes existing social commerce platforms,especially travel-related social commerce platforms(i.e.,QYER.com and Mafengwo,etc.)as well as look through literatures,and find that consumers will follow different information cues when searching information.Information clues such as tags and pictorial information cue may help consumers obtain information quickly and efficiently that meets their needs from a huge body of contents in social commerce.Therefore,this study focuses on tags and the pictorial information cues and concerns with the impacts of these two information cues in social commerce on consumers' search experience and purchase decision,so as to come up with some useful solutions.This translates into research questions are followings:RQ1:In social commerce,whether tag and pictorial information cue will improve consumers' search experience and help them make purchase decision?RQ2:In social commerce,what is the influence mechanism of tag and pictorial information cue on consumers' search experiences and purchase decision?In order to explore the above two research questions,adopting the information foraging theory,this study follows the research framework,namely "information cues——search experience——purchase decision" and establishes a theoretical model of that information clues affecting consumer search experience and purchasing decision.This study examines the search experience from two aspects,including including perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity,and concern with tags and pictorial information cue that can help improve consumers' search experience and then promoting consumers' perceived preference and purchase intention.Therefore,this study adopts methodologies of focus group interview and experimental design and survey.Based on focus group interview and the results of pre-experiment,this study designed a simple social commerce website by using Axure software and simulating China's well-known travel social commerce website Mafengwo.By manipulating the social commerce website,this study creates four different experimental scenarios in corresponding to the research purpose.Thus,this study conducts a 2*2 between-group experiment(without tags and tags)*(low pictorial information cues and high pictorial information cues).The experimental data was processed by the SPSS20.0 and SmartPLS3.0 software.Based on empirical study,the main conclusions of this study are as followings:Firstly,tags and pictorial information cues in social commerce respectively have a positive impact on perceived diagnosticity and perceived serendipity in terms of consumer's search experience of information.Secondly,consumer perceived diagnosticity in information search experience has a positive impact on perceived preference fit and purchase intention.Thirdly,consumer perceived serendipity in information search experience has a positive impact on perceived preferences fit,however it has no significant impact on consumers' purchase intention.Fourthly,perceived preference fit has a positive impact on consumer' purchase intention.Fifthly,tags and pictorial information cues have significant interaction effect on perceived serendipity and perceived preference fit;tags and pictorial information cues have no significant interaction effect on perceived diagnosticity and purchase intention.This study has several theoretical implications.Firstly,this study introduces the information foraging theory into the information processing process of user-generated content in the social commerce,which provides a new research perspective for exploring the purchase decision-making in social commerce.Secondly,this study investigates the factors that affect consumer information searching experience.Not only this study focus on perceived diagnosticity,but also concern with other aspects that easily be overlooked——perceived serendipity,which is more in line with the characteristics of people's access to information in the social commerce.What's more,this study validates that using tags and pictures based on user-generated content of social commerce,not only can effectively convey product or service information,but also convey information scent,which attract consumers to match information needs quickly,improve search experience and promote purchase decisions.This study will improve the information quality of user-generated content in social commerce,improving the information search satisfaction,and and promote the conversion of social network traffic to purchases.