A Study On The Impacts Of Social Commerce Characteristics Upon Relationship Quality And Purchase Intention

Social commerce(s-commerce)is a sort of derived form of e-commerce,based on relationship,and it is facilitated by consumers' social interaction which is established through application of social media.Consumer social interactions on social media have become a very important part of s-commerce.However,only a small amount of companies are able to earn success and make profits in online social activities.Consequently,many researchers and managers consistently believe that s-commerce simply still is at an early stage.How to merge transaction together with social relationship in s-commerce through establishing good buyer-seller relationship in efforts to keep up s-commerce relationship and make it an element of social relationship,is a focused issue in academia and practice.Interactivity,stickiness and word-of mouth referrals are characteristics of s-commerce that differentiated it from conventional e-commerce.In this study,out of the consideration of s-commerce characteristics and based on the perspective of relationship management,a consumer decision-making model was constructed in the context of s-commerce,and discussion about how swift guanxi and trust are built and their exerting mechanism on purchase intention was conducted.To be specific,this study took consumers of agricultural products as respondents,and 306 valid questionnaires were collected.And it utilized the Structural Equation to conduct tests of reliability,validity,hypothesis and mediating effects with the application of SPSS and PLS-Graph statistics analysis software.Finally,empirical results were obtained:(1)Swift guanxi and trust are the vital antecedents of predicting consumers purchase intention,which explains that the relationship quality between consumers and merchants(Swift guanxi and trust)is able to facilitate consumers purchase motivation.(2)Interactivity is the most important factor that influences swift guanxi and trust,and that means in s-commerce making full use of interaction tool is a crucial method to improve the relationship quality between consumers and merchants.(3)Word of mouth referrals positively influences swift guanxi and trust,indicating that in the context of s-commerce word of mouth referrals can enhance the relationship quality between consumers and merchants.(4)Stickiness has no significant impacts on relationship quality,which may be explained by the respondents' young age and the function and design of extant social media.The major contributions of this study consists of:(1)A theoretical model is constructed from relationship management perspective,which is notably crucial for s-commerce researches since s-commerce success largely depends on sustainable relationship of social platforms.Online market trust theory and relationship theory in the Chinese cultural backdrop are the theoretical foundations for construction of relationship between consumers and merchants.The result shows that relationship factor(swift guanxi and trust)explains variances of s-commerce consumers purchase intentions relatively well,the examined model is a key complement to research on s-commerce consumer behavior.(2)The effects of s-commerce characteristics(interactivity,stickiness and word-of-mouth referrals)on s-commerce relationship are explored in this study.It has been concluded that interactivity and word-of-mouth referrals are origins and source power for s-commerce to develop and increase smoothly.Therefore,this suggests that in s-commerce practice,relationship management should be emphasized and the improvement of s-commerce platform should be conducted.Also,practitioners should pay attention to the response speed in the communication with consumers and reduce the information asymmetry between them and consumers.Last but not least,the interests of consumers should act as the basis.All in all,those are beneficial for merging the trade into the social relationship,and flourishing s-commerce economy.