An Empirical Study on Social Commerce Purchase Intention among Malaysian Young Consumers

Abstract

With the prevalence of social media platforms and Web 2.0 technologies, Internet has been slowly turning into a virtual social domain. In recent years, electronic commerce encountered a significant transformation due to the emergence of social commerce, a novel business mode. Social commerce was foreseen to be growing into a USD 80 billion market by 2020, whereas Malaysia has had 25 million of social media users and 16.53 million of online shoppers. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the amount of social networking in Malaysia has also risen from 85.6% to 93.3% in 2020. 93 percent of the Malaysian online marketers were able to approach to new customer base as the results of the existence of different Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Besides, the Malaysian young consumers spent five or more hours per week online, meanwhile 96% of them prefer online purchasing. Previous studies also confirmed Malaysian youth to be regularly buying goods via SNSs. With that being said, young consumers were the most active social media buyers in many countries, and it is mainly due to their tech-savvy characteristics. Further, the eligible Malaysian young consumers were aged 18 -30 in this study. On account of the rising popularity of SNSs and the outbreak of coronavirus, social commerce becomes today's hippest shopping platform. Hence, this research aims to determine factors influencing social commerce purchase intention of young consumers.Current study adopted and extended the UTAUT model in order to evaluate the drivers of consumers' behavioral intention. A total of 200 young consumers have been participated in a structured, selfadministered online questionnaire as they are the most active social media users. Convenience and purposive sampling were selected as the research techniques. This paper also employed PLS-SEM to assess the validity and testability of the established structural model. In summary, trust and perceived ease of use have significant positive correlations with social commerce purchase intentions, whereas subjective norms were found insignificant in this study. For managerial implication, this study suggested the focused area for social commerce marketers in attracting the young consumers. In this vein, the retailers should develop a social environment with honest sellers and fair business governing rules so as to build consumers the confidence to involve in social purchasing activity. Besides, the social commerce marketers must also emphasize on the user-friendly features due to consumers always prefer to shop and purchase from website that is easy to understand and navigate. Subsequently, consumers' buying intention would be fostered through the increase of trust and perceived ease of use. Lastly, recommendation for future research would also be further included such as researchers are suggested to employ and study the proposed structural model in different contexts such as mobile commerce, or in different countries.