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1. Introduction
Today’s sellers are facing challenges in implementing customer-oriented marketing strategies to meet customer demand and create customer value (Hubber et al., 2001). With the emergence of social media, virtual business opportunities have gradually transformed from internet-based trading platforms into a social commerce (SC) platform (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010; Chung, 2015). SC is a business model that uses social media, such as Facebook, to support not only business-to-consumer (B2C) but also consumer-to-consumer (C2C) electronic-commerce transactions. Such platforms offer effective interactive services to engage their customers with SC (Andrew and Olivier, 2010), e.g. online chat, dating, video sharing, and virtual groups, known as social shopping. Social shopping is about connecting customers to discover, share, recommend, rate products, and initiate or simplify purchase decisions (Olbrich and Holsing, 2011/2012). Besides using the fan pages on Facebook for social shopping (Leong et al., 2017), more and more businesses have cooperated with individuals who are core members of the social network and have power of influence in the network. These core members can be social shopping initiators who posted some announcements on their personal pages or Facebook Groups and often uploaded a demonstration video or photos for sales items or added a link to their blogs for illustrating item details. Their fans often ask for the prices or other related questions. After the completion of purchase order forms, which may be the Group Docs in Facebook, external Google Forms, or official business websites, customers will remit payment to the sellers’ accounts. Such a shopping process is common in Facebook Groups today.
Network closure among sellers and buyers in SC community is linking many customers closely and allowing sellers to face groups of customers from social media sites (Xiao et al., 2015). Due to the real-time exchange of information among customers through social media, a new era of information transparency for consumption is arriving swiftly. Social media not only allow each user to communicate with a large number of customers whom they never met in their lives but also offer more buyer-generated information to them. Accordingly, the purchasing behaviors of customers are changing. In other words, they do not rely on the information provided by the sellers but prefer to believe in a wide range of referrals...