Study On Users’ Purchase Intention Of Social Commerce:Based On Social Capital

In recent two years,driven by the development of electronic commerce and social media,social commerce,a new application,was born.Although social commerce was born just for a short time,it was welcome by users.For example,Pintrest.com,a typical social commerce abroad,its traffic had exceeded many popular portal websites.There were very few researches in social commerce,for it was a new application.This study tried to introduce Theory of Social Capital into research field of social commerce,and focused on two main research questions as below.Research Question 1(RQ1):The antecedents of users’ social capital in social commerce context.Research Question 2(RQ2):The relationship between social capital and users’purchase intention of social commerce.For RQl,based on literature research and investigation of mainstream social commerce websites,this study proposed research variables and hypotheses,and established a multiple liner regression model.A website crawler was employed to collect the users’interaction data.The users’ interaction data was conducted to examine the model and hypotheses.Moreover,RQ1 was discussed in Chapter 3.For RQ2,literature research was conducted too.Then,this study introduced Theory of Social Capital and;“Perceived Enjoyment”into the Technology Acceptance Model(TAM),and formed the proposed model of users’ purchase intention of social commerce.Based on the mature/classical scale,Back-Translation and interview was employed to build questionnaire for this research.Then,reliability and validity of questionnaire were examined.The results,such as hypotheses and path analysis,were also investigated and discussed.Based on the two empirical studies,this study obtained some main findings and conclusions as followings.(1)In social commerce context,users’ social capital has a positive relation with self-disclosure,following other users,content generating,and medal.(2)The relation between authentication and users’ social capital is not significant in social commerce websites.(3)Social interaction ties,one facet of structural social capital,has no significant impact on users’ purchase intention of social commerce.(4)Trust,one facet of relational social capital,is a very important intervening variable.Trust has an indirect positive effect on purchase intention via attitude.Reciprocity,Identification and Shared Vision have a direct positive effect on Trust,that is to say,the three constructs have an indirect positive effect on purchase intention via Trust and Attitude.(5)Identification has a positive impact on Perceived Enjoyment(PE).Moreover,PE has a positive effect on Attitude and purchase intention.In other words,Identification has an indirect positive effect on Attitude and purchase intention via PE.(6)Shared Vision has an indirect positive effect on Attitude and purchase intention via Perceived Usefulness(PU).(7)Shared Language has a positive impact on Perceived Ease of Use(PEOU).Meanwhile,PEOU has a direct positive effect on PU,Attitude and PE.Therefore,Shared Language has an indirect positive impact on purchase intention in social commerce.(8)Compared to Perceived Usefulness,Perceived Ease of Use has a minor positive effect on Attitude.The findings and conclusions of this study,not only extend the research fields of social capital and social commerce,but also provide some valuable guidelines for social commerce websites and users.The main theoretical contributions of this study are as follows.Firstly,this study early introduces Theory of Social Capital into research fields of social commerce.And this will contribute to new theoretical support for further researches.Secondly,based on Theory of Social Capital,extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation,the proposed model of purchase intention will contribute to new theoretical basis and guidelines.Thirdly,analysis based on objective data of users’ interaction will provide a new perspective to investigate users’ social capital and its antecedents.However,this study also has some limitations.Firstly,most of the participants in this study are females and students,thus,the generalization of the results need to be examined in the future.Secondly,this dissertation only investigates users of four social commerce websites;therefore,users of other social commerce websites should be investigated in the future.Thirdly,the mediate effect of age,experience of social commerce use and experience of online purchase need to be examined in the future research of social commerce.