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Charting consumers' continued social commerce intention

Xi Hu (School of International Economics and Trade, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China)
Zhenjiao Chen (School of Information Technology & Management, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China)
Robert M. Davison (Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China)
Yaqin Liu (School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China)

Internet Research

ISSN: 1066-2243

Article publication date: 15 June 2021

Issue publication date: 18 January 2022

1775

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing consumers' continued social commerce (s-commerce) intention and its underlying mechanism.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors define continued s-commerce intention as consumers' intention to continually participate in s-commerce activities, namely, requesting and sharing commercial information. Grounded in the motivation theory, perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment are identified in this study as the motives behind consumers' continued s-commerce intention. Given the indispensable social facet of s-commerce, the authors include social support as another critical social factor motivating continuance intention. Furthermore, users' perceptions are affected by prior s-commerce outcomes, which concern the effectiveness of the commercial information exchange process. Research suggests that in such a context, the result of communication is jointly determined by source credibility and interactive relationships amongst individuals. Whilst source credibility determines the usefulness of the information transmitted, a social interaction supports this process. Therefore, source credibility and social interactions are crucial to the outcomes of s-commerce, which, in turn, affect consumers' perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment and social support in s-commerce. Building on these arguments, the authors propose our research model and then test the hypotheses via a survey.

Findings

The authors find that consumers' perceived usefulness and informational social support of s-commerce directly affect their continued s-commerce intention. Moreover, perceived enjoyment leads to continued s-commerce intention via the mediation of perceived usefulness, whilst emotional social support influences continued s-commerce intention through the mediator of informational social support. In addition, source credibility is a significant antecedent of consumers' usefulness, enjoyment and social support perceptions, whilst a social interaction significantly impacts perceived enjoyment and social support.

Originality/value

Various consumer behaviours in s-commerce have been studied; however, the continuance intention to participate in the s-commerce activity remains unknown. This empirical study fills this research gap. Moreover, the authors initially reveal s-commerce participants' utilitarian orientation in the post-adoption stage: perceived usefulness and informational social support affect continuance intention more directly than perceived enjoyment and emotional social support. Further, prior studies on information systems continuance have mainly focused on technical features. By identifying the influence from social factors, i.e. social support, this work extends the literature on information systems continuance.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This article is developed upon our conference paper “X. Hu*, X. Wu, P. Yin and X. Zheng. (2017). An investigation into consumers' continued social shopping intentions”. In proceedings of 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, Malaysia.”

This work was supported by the Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (19EYB001), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72072013).

Citation

Hu, X., Chen, Z., Davison, R.M. and Liu, Y. (2022), "Charting consumers' continued social commerce intention", Internet Research, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 120-149. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-07-2020-0397

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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