Charting consumers' continued social commerce intention

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.

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