تعاملات مردم، تکنولوژی ها، و سازمان ها در دوره ی تجارت اجتماعی

ABSTRACT People, Technologies, and Organizations Interactions in a Social Commerce Era

SOCIAL commerce, a powerful combination of customer- oriented social computing technologies and new commercial features, is having an increasing impact on e-commerce and is now beginning to generate substantial economic benefits for many online retailers [1]. Social commerce is defined as “the forms of Internet-based social media that allow people to actively participate in the marketing and selling of products and services in online marketplaces and communities” [2, p. 215].

In general, social commerce can be viewed as a virtual shopping center that creates economic value by making the shops more accessible to browse with social tools and empowering customers by facilitating interactions with others on the platforms [2]; and computer-mediated social environments, where sustained social interactions exist among community members. Social commerce has great potential for not only influencing consumers’ behavior and intention to adopt a brand, but also as a business strategy to increase companies’ sales and brand values [3], [4]. However, customers’ roles can vary significantly across different social networking sites (SNSs), ranging from simply visiting a site, through contributing to its content by posting product reviews and recommendations or serving as brand ambassadors by sharing user experiences and stories with others, to purchasing from online stores [2]. Many social commerce websites are making huge investments in social technologies to encourage their prospects to convert from visitors to purchasers and thus generate substantial sales growth, but this remains a challenge. Understanding the determinants of consumer purchase on social commerce sites is thus a priority in social commerce research.

Traditional e-commerce platforms primarily use Web technologies, which rely far less on the interaction between buyer and seller [5], and the process of acquiring product and shopping information is similar to window shopping [6]. Consumers interact with online vendors and base their decisions on information provided by the vendors’ websites [7]. When it comes to social commerce, the explosion of social media applications use provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to think long-term value beyond that of a traditional e-commerce site [8]. Social commerce, where Web 2.0 technologies are used intensively, encourages a more interactive environment for consumers [9]. Even if social commerce is now more influential than traditional e-commerce systems, sustainable growth is not assured with simply adding shopping buttons to companies’ profile page without offering any benefits to their customers. In this regard, it is imperative to revisit consumers’ adoption behaviors and develop a new model from a social commerce perspective.

To date there has been limited attention given to improving our understanding of why consumers make a purchase on social commerce sites [10]. Thus, we seek to fill this gap by examining factors that influence consumer intention to purchase on social commerce sites. We apply socio-technical theory to the social commerce context. It focuses on the identification of important social and technical factors that affect consumers’ perceptions, trust, and intention. Specifically, we integrate social commerce features such as forums and communities, ratings and reviews, and recommendations and referrals as technical enablers of social commerce with social enablers of social commerce such as user experience, familiarity, and learning and training identified from the literature on e-commerce into the trust and technology acceptance model (TAM).

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The following sections present the theoretical background to this study, explaining the development of the research model and the associated hypotheses. We then move on to describe the methodology adopted and the results obtained. The paper concludes by discussing our findings and their implications for theory and practice.