Empirical Research On E-WOM Effect In Context Of Social Commerce

With the rapid development of the Internet,social commerce has been quickly emerging and drastically developing as a new form of e-commerce.Social commerce,which combines the characteristics of social media and e-commerce,enables users to socialize,browse product information,share shopping experiences and so on.Therefore,the characteristics of word-of-mouth information has become one of the important factors which affects consumers' participation in social commerce.There are much research on the characteristics of Internet word-of-mouth information has emerged in many papers.And prior research has largely focused on the influence of Internet word-of-mouth on user attitudes and behavioral intention.But in fact,Social commerce includes some characteristics of social media.And the sense of virtual community plays an important role in social media.However,there is scant study that investigates the relationship between characteristics of Internet word-of-mouth and the sense of virtual community.In order to bridge this gap,we propose an model which is grounded on the"Stimulus-Organism-Response(SOR)" model and the theory of the sense of virtual community to examine how the impacts of characteristics of Internet word-of-mouth on the sense of virtual community.We take the quality and the quantity of Internet word-of mouth into consideration.In addition user' involvement is introduced as a moderator variable to explore the impacting mechanism of the sense of virtual community on consumers' purchasing intention.A survey is used to test our proposed research model and hypotheses and 449 valid questionnaires are collected.Structure Equation Modeling and AMOS are adopted to test the model,and SPSS are suggested to test sufficient reliability and construct validity.The empirical research results show that the quantity of word of mouth positively affects influence and immersion,and the quality of word-of-mouth positively affects the members sense and influence.The professionalism of publishers only has a significant positive impact on members sense.The three dimensions of the sense of virtual community have a significant positive impact on the consumers' purchasing intention.The effect between member sense and information interaction is not significant,and influence only has a significant impact on emotional interaction.Both information interaction and emotional interaction have a significant impact on the consumers' purchasing intention.In addition,the moderating effect of user involvement is verified.