Impacts Of Social Commerce Platform On Value Propositions Of E-commerce Enterprises

Social Commerce has become a new trend in the development of e-commerce industry. Many e-commerce enterprises are turning to social networks for marketing support. As a result, researchers are paying more attention to social commerce. However, former research focused more on the relationship of social commerce and its users, neglecting its effect on e-commerce enterprises. What on earth could be done to the value propositions of e-commerce enterprises with the help of social commerce? This paper concerntrates on the nature of inter-user ties and product information property, and discusses the impacts of social networks on the value propositions of e-commerce enterprises.We conducted a survey among end users from different social commerce platforms. After carrying out regression analysis on a sample of 293 respondents, we have reached the following conclusions. Based on social network theory, social commerce platforms can be categorized into advice networks and friendship networks, the corresponding inter-user ties are instrumental and expressive. Instrumental ties can improve percieved information quality of products on the platform, thus enhancing percieved efficiency and novelty value proposition of e-commerce enterprises. And expressive ties will promote percieved lock-in value proposition of e-commerce enterprises by increasing percieved information credibility of products.The whole article is organized as follows. Chapter 1 mainly discusses the related research background and presents the research question. Chapter 2 provides a systematical literature review on social commerce and value proposition. Chapter 3 raises a series of research hypotheses and proposes the research model. Chapter 4 analyzes the data collected from 293 respondents and tests the hypotheses. Chapter 5 discusses the results, implications as well as limitations and suggestions for further research. The final chapter lists references.