An Examination of Factors Associated with User Acceptance of Social Shopping Websites

Social Commerce And Applications

In this study, social commerce is defined as technology-enabled shopping experiences where online consumer interactions while shopping provide the main mechanism for conducting social shopping activities. These activities may include discovering products, aggregating and sharing product information, and collaboratively making shopping decisions.

Research in the marketing literature suggests that consumers have two distinct types of orientations when visiting Business-to-Consumer (B2C) websites: transactional and social (Mathwick, 2002). The transactional orientation focuses on completing the shopping tasks, while the social orientation focuses on relationship building. The provision of customer reviews and personalized recommendations (such as on Amazon.com) has been shown to be a significant feature that improve the online shopping experience (Kumar & Benbasat, 2006). Similarly, electronic word-of-mouth websites (such as epinion.com) where consumers can read the opinions and experiences of other consumers and provide their own comments and ratings on a wide range of products online have become popular (Lee & Lee, 2009; Park, Lee, & Han, 2007). Although these technologies enhance the online shopping experience, the focus of these technologies is primarily on efficiency.