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1. Introduction
Social commerce is a new form of e-commerce that applies the features of Web 2.0 technologies to design a customer-oriented business (Liang and Turban, 2011). It enables consumers to generate contents for the purpose of sharing information about their shopping experiences and conduct social interactions in purchase processes. Different from traditional e-commerce platforms, social commerce sites are embedded with some social networking capabilities. For example, Dianping.com, a famous social commerce site in China, allows consumers to establish their own profiles, share shopping experiences, review products or services and even build social relationships with other online consumers. Generally speaking, there exist two major modes of social commerce. The first one can be called indirect purchasing mode. For example, nowadays many companies join popular social media, such as Facebook and Instagram to run fan pages. Through these pages, companies can advertise and promote goods, and social media users can browse posts, share experiences and discuss some information related to their interested products or services (Cho, 2017; Farivar et al., 2017). The second mode is direct purchasing model. In this mode, consumers can purchase goods directly from some social commerce sites. These sites can be regarded as a type of online shopping platforms leveraging Web 2.0 tools and concepts to establish individuals’ social interactions during purchase processes. They connect consumers with each other and encourage them to review, rate, recommend, share and then promote their purchase intention (Hajli, 2015). Compared with fan pages and virtual communities of social commerce, the direct purchase mode is much closer to situations requiring consumers to make purchase decisions, thereby actual behaviors or intentions during purchase processes can be more easily detected. This study is to explore consumers’ purchase intention in social commerce, and thus the direct purchasing mode will be mainly considered.
Social commerce is a both rewarding and challenging business model. It is expected that the global revenue of social commerce will reach $80bn by 2020 (Insights, 2012), and thus has huge market potential. But on the other hand, as a great number of social commerce sites are available in recent years, intense competitions among social commerce providers inevitably exist. From a corporate perspective, understanding how to motivate consumers’ intention to engage in online purchases from social commerce...