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Top1. Introduction
Social media is becoming the preferred channel for communication, entertainment and even business (Alquraan et al., 2017). The popularity, ease of use, and mobility of social media applications, are shaping the way we transact, communicate, and live our lives in the 21st century. Such social environment opened doors for humans to interact and socialize without location and time challenges. The top ranked popular social media platforms exceeded the populations of many countries. Facebook reported 2.2 billion users in 2019, YouTube reported 1.7 billion users in 2019, and Twitter reported 1.2 billion users in 2019 (Smart Insights, 2019).
The popularity of social media made it necessary for businesses to adopt such open platforms for reaching their customers. A smart practice is to target your customers wherever they are and follow them through the favorite channel they prefer. Social media is considered by many a revolution that changed our lives and influenced many practices (by businesses) and behaviors (by customers). Based on that, businesses tried to utilize such channel to conduct business and offer their products and services through social media platforms. Such practices are called social commerce. It includes all business transactions conducted on social media.
Utilizing social media for commerce is new for many businesses and for customers as well. The evolution from traditional brick and mortar business, to click and mortar business changed the business environment and how businesses compete. Still, the majority of research conducted focused on electronic commerce, where transactions are made online, but not on a social platform. Building a proprietary social platform makes it impractical for businesses as they will lose the advantage of population size, and will limit their exposure to existing customer base. Based on that, businesses tried to benefit from existing social media platforms to reach existing and new customers.
This study tried to adapt the UTAUT2 for the purpose of social commerce. The original model focused on the moderation influence and utilized 8 predictors of behavioral intentions. This proposed model extended the UTAUT2 with trust and adapted the model to the social commerce environment. The study tried to answer the following research question:
The following section will try to explore the literature for the purpose of building the research model and summing the factors that are expected to influence the intention to use social commerce. Section three will describe the details of the research method conducted. Section four will describe the data analysis and discuss the results. The discussion will report the implications of research and the limitations and future work. Finally, section five will summarize the conclusions of research.
Top2. Literature Review
This study aimed at exploring the context of social commerce, founding its investigation on the UTAUT2 model. The UTAUT2 model was proposed by Venkatesh et al. (2012) and extended the UTAUT with major changes. The study explored both models and the major indicators used and tried to adapt the UTAUT2 to social commerce environment with structural changes.