Social Commerce and Consumer Decision Making: A Conceptual Model from Social Support Perspective.

Abstract

The emergence of social commerce made a paradigm shift in the business-consumer relationship realm. In fact, more power has shifted from the seller to the buyer and predominately fueled to strengthen e-commerce acceptance. Thus, understanding consumer behavior in the context of social commerce adoption has become inevitable for organizations that aim to convince consumers by particularly exploiting the advantage of social relationships and support. Moreover, such social ties will be able to facilitate trust as the most promising benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which were the major concerns with online commerce over the years. This paper presents a framework to comprehend the impact of social commerce on the consumer decision making process stages; need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post purchase behavior with special reference to the social support perspective. In this context, pertaining literature in the field of social commerce; (1) lacks adequate explanatory model or (2) lacks substantial theoretical foundation or (3) consist practically complex models with inadequate empirical evidence. The research model employs the Social Commerce Constructs (SCC): recommendations and referrals, forums and communities, and ratings and reviews to examine the respective influence towards the consumer decision making process stages. Therefore, this paper intends to comprehend the impact of social commerce towards an integrative model incorporating all the consumer decision steps anticipating new knowledge. Further, this conceptual model is suggested to be empirically tested to validate the practical implications.