UNVEILING THE IMPACTS OF SOCIAL COMMERCE FEATURES – AN INTEGRATED RESEARCH MODEL

Social commerce, the application of social media to support e-commerce transactions, is becoming a lucrative means for e-commerce companies to increase their sales volumes. To achieve this goal, companies today can extend their e-commerce websites with a wide range of diverse social commerce features. Hence, knowledge is required how the integration of certain social commerce features stimulates consumers to adopt social commerce websites and which features might deliver the highest benefits in a particular scenario. However, current literature provides little insight about how concrete social commerce features influence the consumers’ willingness to adopt social commerce websites. To contribute to the closure of this research gap, we propose a research model that allows evaluating the impacts of social commerce features on the consumers’ adoption of social commerce websites in a systematic, comparable manner. Therefore, the research model integrates several adoption factors, taking into account utilitarian, hedonic, relational, and social determinants. We also describe how the hypotheses contained in our research model can be evaluated in an experimental setting. In so doing, we expect our research to contribute to achieving a better understanding of how certain social commerce features can improve the design of social commerce websites