ACCI Conference 2020

Social commerce sites allow consumers and sellers to engage in two concurrent types of interaction during the buying process. These sites provide the addition of online social signals alongside traditional e-commerce product information. Through these social signals sellers communicate, and consumers react to, a variety of influences during the shopping experience.  This study seeks to fill a gap in current research by investigating how the combined e-commerce and social networking functionality of social commerce sites may impact consumer purchasing behavior.  More specifically, it focuses on those social signals specifically communicated through profile pictures, logos, and other social networking practices (e.g. “follows,” “likes”), and their correlation to retail shop performance indicators on a social commerce site. Using a sample of social and commerce performance indicators from US-based shops on “Etsy.com”, and a stepwise negative binomial regression analysis, we evaluate the influence of explicit and implicit social signals on consumer purchasing behavior. Findings suggest consumers are more likely to purchase from shops where an owner displays a picture of a human likeness and has greater consumer engagement shown by higher numbers of reviews and followers. These features also appear to lower the impact of the age of a shop.

Author(s): Morgan Bryant