Influence of social interaction on the purchase behavior of social commerce consumers

BACKGROUND: Compared with traditional e-commerce, a significant feature of social commerce is the more complex network of social relations built by the user through frequent online interaction and communication. This relationship network strengthens the impact of social interaction on its purchase behavior and highlights the necessity to study social interaction in social commerce. OBJECTIVE: This research aims to study the mechanism of social interaction on the purchase behavior of social commerce consumers based on the SOR theory. METHODS: This research uses SEM to perform hypothesis testing. The survey data of 622 consumers are used to conduct empirical tests on the hypothesis proposed in the research. RESULTS: The research results show that user-website interaction, user-seller interaction, user-user interaction, user-online friend interaction can significantly enhance users’ physical presence; user-seller interaction, user-user interaction, and user-online friend interaction can significantly enhance users’ social presence; other variables can significantly enhance users’ flow experience except for the user-seller interaction; the physical presence and social presence significantly affect users’ impulsive purchasing intention, but have no significant effect on repeat purchasing intention; the flow experience significantly affects users’ impulsive purchasing willingness and repeat purchasing willingness. CONCLUSION: By connecting social interaction theory, presence theory, flow experience theory with consumer purchase behavior, the research group provides a new lens for how social interaction influence consumers’ purchase behavior in social business platform. The social business platform can learn from the research results of this paper and formulate corresponding measures to promote its own development.