The Influence of Social Commerce on Consumer Decisions

Abstract

Today, comprehending consumer behavior is becoming dynamically challenging with the emergence of social commerce. Business organizations are now striving to convince consumers by exploiting the advantage of social support empowered by online social networks. Importantly, social ties in such online social networks facilitate trust as the most compelling benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which happened to be the major concerns with electronic commerce over the years. This research study is aimed at understanding the impact of social commerce on the consumer behavior, particularly consumer decision-making stages. Hence, this research was conducted as a quantitative study involving a cross-sectional survey and gathered valid responses from Facebook users. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze data and test hypotheses. The findings exhibited significant positive effects from social commerce on all the consumer decision-making stages namely; need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase decision. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of employing an appropriate social commerce strategy for business organizations.