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In recent years, e-commerce has flourished, especially with the emergence of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and Weibo, and they have affected the way people work, socialize, access information, and shop online. In China, the WeChat app function, “WeChat Friendship Circle,” provides people with an increasing amount of opportunities to start up new businesses (Li, 2017; Chu, 2018). A WeChat-based businesses is based on a new business model in the WeChat mobile app that uses the help of social software and social networking. There has been a rapid development of big data in terms of data mining (Chang & Yang, 2017), complex event analysis and multimedia event recognition (Chang, Ma, Yang, Zeng, & Hauptmann, 2017; Chang, Yu, Yang, & Xing, 2017; Li, Nie & Chang, 2017), multimedia social networks that are based on trust (Li, Zhang, and Zhang, 2018), cloud-based manufacturing composite services (Namjoo, Keramati, & Torabi, 2018), rapid sensor detection (Chang, Ma, Lin, Yang, & Hauptmann, 2017), information technology for smart cities (Maestre-Gongora & Bernal, 2019), information and communications technology (Morrar, Abdeljawad, Kisa, & Younis, 2019), regulatory effect of consumer cognition innovation based on the S-O-R model (Osmal, Kang, & Iwona1, 2019) and database security (Sangeeta & Narsimha, 2018) to provide a technical basis for the development and maturation of the WeChat-based businesses model. According to the Statistical Report on the Development of China’s Internet Network released by the CNNIC, the usage rate for WeChat has been increasing year by year since the appearance of its “WeChat Friendship Circle.” By December 2017, the usage rate for WeChat reached 87.3% (Shan, 2018). WeChat has become a new way of doing business in China, and it can be seen as a combination of traditional e-commerce and social network communication. A WeChat-based business develops its customer relationships in two ways, through business relationships and friendships (Yang, 2016). One WeChat-based business entered the consumers’ range of vision with a new marketing model (i.e., opening a shop based in the WeChat Friendship Circle) in 2013 by disseminating across social platforms pictures of various products, including cosmetics, healthcare products, and clothes.
With the rapid development of WeChat-based businesses, the issue of integrity has come to the forefront. The false propaganda about some virtual trade events has seriously damaged the interests of consumers. For example, the “toxic facial mask” incident involved changing the appearance of young girls into the “Green Lantern.” On September 30, 2016, CCTV exposed the “consumption trap of WeChat about pyramid selling,” which made consumers doubt the reliability of WeChat products as well as the integrity of WeChat-based businesses. The undated products and the false propaganda led to a discussion about WeChat-based businesses by scholars. The research about this topic mainly involves three aspects: