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New research emphasizes the importance of social communications in e-commerce purchase decision-making processes but there are many technical and social challenges such as multi-faceted trust concerns. How consumers view and value referent’s online testimonials, ratings, rants and raves, and product usage experiences remain an important factor that needs to be better understood. Social commerce as a relatively new stream in e-commerce yet is growing fast and gaining the attention of scholars and practitioners, especially due to recent revenue developments. Consistent with e-commerce websites that do not enable consumer feedback, trust is a challenging matter for consumers to consider when they visit social commerce websites. Researching trust models and influences is increasingly important especially with the proliferation of online word of mouth (WOM) strongly effecting many consumers at many different phases of social commerce purchase decision making and transacting. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study examines the effects and importance of institution-based trust and WOM within a model of consumer behaviour on social commerce websites. This research examines how trust and consumer feedback may affect consumers’ purchase intentions. This study collects data from the little-understood market of urban Iran and develops a research model to examine consumers’ purchase intentions on social commerce websites. A robust data set from urban Iran (n=512) is analyzed using partial least squares regression to analyze the proposed model.

The results of the analysis show that institution-based trust influences social media communication, leading to elevated purchase intention on social commerce websites. This research adds to the prior literature that espouses on the importance of consumers developing strong beliefs of vendor trust in social commerce platforms.

Explaining how consumer purchase decision making is effected by using institution-based trust and electronic WOM in a little understood Middle Eastern context an important contribution of this research. Suggestions on practical and theoretical developments of this research in the sharing commerce research stream conclude this paper.

In the competitive e-marketplace today, sellers are using an increasing number of signals to entice customers to make online purchases. However, how differential these signals are in terms of their capacity to improve sales performance has not yet been investigated. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Drawing on signaling theory and grounded in the context of China’s largest e-marketplace, Taobao, this study investigated the different effects of five commonly used signals on the sales performance of e-marketplace sellers.

The authors find that warranty has the highest effect on sales performance, followed by overall rating, mean detailed seller rating, percent of positives, and web site quality.

First, this study builds on signaling theory and contributes to the e-marketplace literature by providing new insights into how specific signals differentially affect sales performance in the e-marketplace (with evidence from a large-scale empirical analysis). Second, the study extends the applicability of signaling theory to the e-marketplace domain by incorporating distinctive features of the e-marketplace into the original signaling theory. Finally, the findings lend practical support to e-marketplace sellers’ investment decisions on signals and provide guidelines for deployment of such signals.

Because online shopping is risky, there is a strong need to develop better presentation of online reviews, which may reduce the perceived risk and create more pleasurable shopping experiences. To test the impact of online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation, the purpose of this paper is to adopt a scenario experiment to study consumers’ decision-making process under the two scenarios of mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews collected from Jingdong.com in China: focusing on the comparative analysis on the differences of the consumers’ perceived risk, purchase intention and purchase delay, and further studying the interaction effect of involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

This paper employed a 2×2 factorial experiment to test the hypothesis. The experimental design is divided into four groups: 2 (online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation: mixed presentation vs classified presentation) × 2 (involvement: low vs high), each of which contains 90 samples. Through the data analysis, the main effect, mediation effect and moderating effect were examined.

The results show that compared with mixed presentation, classified presentation can reduce purchase intention and increase purchase delay due to the existence of loss aversion and availability heuristic. Furthermore, the paper also confirms that there is a significant interaction effect between involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

The existing research pays less attention to the impact of online reviews presentation on consumers’ decision making, especially the lack of discussion on the interaction effect between involvement and online reviews presentation. For this reason, this paper proposes a problem, which concerns whether mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews will affect consumers’ decision making differently.

Since its inception in 2009, the growth of real-time bidding (RTB) advertising has been dramatic. Yet, there is a dearth of research in the information system (IS) literature despite the potential for negative e-commerce outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to identify salient antecedents of users’ attitude toward RTB advertisements.

A research model was constructed and tested with data from 437 respondents. SmartPLS 3.0, a partial least square (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) tool, was used to evaluate the research model and test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that user attitude is determined by opposing influences from the cognitive and affective attributes of an RTB advertisement. A surprise is found to elicit greater perception of advertisement personalization, timeliness and relevance, as well as privacy and intrusiveness concerns. While RTB advertisement relevance appears to lessen the effect of advertisement intrusiveness, privacy concern is exacerbated when the advertisement is more personalized. The authors discuss the implications of this study for click-through intentions and e-commerce.

At this point in the evolution of RTB advertising, the findings indicate that the surprise generated by the appearance of an RTB advertisement is not currently a “bad” surprise. In addition, the formation of positive user attitude toward RTB is complex because cognitive factors interact with users' concerns to strengthen or weaken the negative effects. The authors also demonstrate that attitude and stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) theories are useful theoretical bases for the development of causal models to predict RTB attitude and click-through intentions.

Social commerce sites offer fertile ground for users to communicate product information. Given that such sites have the potential to transform the way of doing business, it is clearly important for academics to understand user information sharing on social commerce sites. Existing research has considered motivations as core elements of user information sharing in online communities. The purpose of this paper is to advance the theoretical understanding of user information sharing by investigating differences in motivations between the different user types of social commerce sites: sellers and buyers, and the impact on social commerce.

The authors conducted an empirical study by analyzing data from a social commerce site in China, including panel data (n=892) and survey data (n=913).

This research showed that user type (i.e. sellers and buyers) plays an important moderating role in user information sharing: sellers exert a positive moderating effect on utilitarian and social motivations, while buyers are found to have a positive moderating effect on hedonic motivation.

This study contributes to existing literature, not only by exploring the antecedents of user information sharing on social commerce sites from utilitarian, hedonic and social dimensions, but also by providing an evaluation of user types (i.e. sellers and buyers). The authors believe that the results of this study offer important and interesting insights for IS research and practice.

This study will enhance social commerce site managers’ understanding of better features for information sharing and differences in motivation between sellers and buyers. This could improve the effectiveness of encouraging strategies and help social commerce sites be more sustainable in the highly competitive contemporary environment.

Based on social exchange theory and motivation theory, this paper takes user types into account, and postulate that user type (i.e. sellers and buyers) plays a moderating role in the relationships between motivations (i.e. utilitarian, hedonic and social motivation) and user information sharing intention on social commerce sites.

The study aims to look at deep eWOM providing behaviour in m-commerce and attempts to explore its antecedents. Personalisation is proposed as an indirect antecedent of deep eWOM providing behaviour mediated by hedonic and utilitarian value perceptions and personal identification.

Based on social-exchange theory, the conceptual model links the study antecedents to deep eWOM providing behaviour. The conceptual model was validated through a multi-country study. A large sample of m-commerce users in the UK (n = 505), India (n = 422) and Vietnam (n = 618) were contacted to collect the data. Data were analysed through structural equations modelling procedure with invariance analysis conducted to ensure that the results from the three samples could be compared. The authors also conducted post-hoc analysis to explore the mediation paths between variables.

The study finds support to the conceptual model across the samples from the three countries. Personalisation is found to increase value perceptions – both utilitarian and hedonic – and personal identification which leads to “deep” eWOM providing behaviour across all the three countries. The serial mediation also provides comparable results across the three countries.

The study contributes to the understanding of deep eWOM providing behaviour – a construct with high practical relevance which has however not been explored sufficiently in current literature. The study also contributes to the literature that analyses the consequences of personalisation in m-commerce.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how augmented reality (AR) try-on experiences facilitate consumers’ shopping decision. Focusing on the immersion and psychological ownership, the study investigated how the properties of AR experiences (environmental embedding (EE) and simulated physical control (SPC)) affect decision comfort.

This research theoretically and empirically analyzes how each property of AR experiences affects consequential psychological states and then further increases decision comfort by employing an existing AR try-on mobile application. A total of 99 valid responses were used for the partial least square structural equation modeling analysis. One’s prior AR try-on experience was predicted as a moderator and analyzed using SPSS-based PROCESS macro.

The results demonstrated that EE and SPC evoke immersion and the feeling of ownership of a virtual product, which increased decision comfort. The moderating effect of one’s prior AR try-on experience showed that the impact of EE and SPC on immersion was attenuated for those with prior experience. Further, immersion mediated the effect of EE but SPC on the feeling of ownership, which corroborated the direct effect of SPC on the feeling of ownership.

Firms must consider technological and user-experience features that can induce users to perceive high levels of AR characteristics such as EE and SPC. Practitioners should develop realistic content that can correctly place virtual products on users to enhance EE. Including more interactive features is encouraged to provide users with a feeling of control toward the virtual product that directly leads to ownership and positively affects decision making. Further, practitioners need to be cautious about consumers getting used to the new technology; retailers and marketers need to focus on creating new and innovative content to continually engage customers.

This study adopted EE and SPC to determine how each property of AR experience forms the consequential psychological states, particularly depending on one’s prior experience. Methodologically, the study provided external validity in conducting an experiment by adopting an existing AR mobile application available in the market and employing an objective measure of respondents (e.g. prior AR try-on experience).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of users’ simulated experience in a virtual store and to show the subsequent impact of that experience on engagement. The outcome of that engagement is examined in relation to enjoyment, satisfaction and purchase intentions.

The method comprised an experiment comparing users’ perceptions of a standard 2D online clothing store with an enhanced, immersive one that aimed to provide shopping value approaching that of a traditional store by using a 3D experience where participants wore special glasses and a data glove.

Results demonstrate the major role of telepresence components in simulated experience and the critical role of that experience, along with hedonic and utilitarian values, in engagement. Purchase intention is influenced by satisfaction, which is in turn influenced by enjoyment and engagement. Engagement in turn is influenced by utilitarian and hedonic value and the experience of product simulation or telepresence, which is composed of control, colour and graphics vividness, and 3D authenticity. In the immersive, 3D environment, experience is more associated with engagement and enjoyment, leading to greater purchase intention. The immersive, 3D environment, thus, has the potential to rival traditional shopping in terms of experience, resulting in higher sales for retailers and satisfaction for consumers.

This work has evaluated a robust model of purchase intention and demonstrated it to hold not only in a 3D environment on a conventional computer platform, but also in an immersive one, where participants wear special glasses and a data glove.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the integrated impact of the application of protection measures against identity theft on consumers’ synergistic perception of trust, the cost of products/services and operational performance (OP) – all of which in turn is postulated to contribute to purchase intention (PI) when shopping online.

In order to accomplish the specified aim, this study first conducted an experiment by involving the students from a university in Bangladesh. Then a survey was conducted to capture their opinion based on the previous experiment.

The study identified that in e-commerce, OP and trust have potential impact on pursuing consumers’ PI. Traditionally, price is always an issue in marketing; however, for e-commerce, this issue does not have direct impact on PI.

The main limitation of this study is that a less established e-commerce example was utilized to conduct the experiment and survey for validating the model. Also, the study was conducted only in the context of Bangladesh and a student sample was utilized. Future studies can test the model in different contexts (particularly to verify the impact of privacy) by utilizing data from consumers.

This study has resolved a controversial issue by generating clear guidelines that the overall conjoint effect of OP, trust, and price on PI is neither negative nor neutral. Synergistically, the application of these controlling tools of identity theft can substantially enhance consumers’ trust, which is the single most predictor to pursue consumer PI.

This study has provided in-depth insight into the impact of different controlling measures in e-commerce PI. Practitioners have potential learning from this study that if consumers find the application of different controlling mechanisms against cybercrimes, particularly identity theft, enhancing the reliability, authenticity and security of transactions in this virtual medium, they do not mind paying a higher price. Such insights have not been provided by existing studies on this topic. Developing trust on e-commerce purchase is the driving force, not the price.