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Social networking sits (SNSs) are applications allowing users to communicate and connect with each other, to build up a personal network whose members share common interests, and to interact regularly in an organized way over the Internet. Over recent decades, social commerce has emerged following the rapid growth of SNSs and has considerably changed social media and e-commerce by adding commercial elements to social media (Liang et al., 2011; Shen et al., 2019). According to an eMarketer report (Garcia, 2018), social commerce has been regarded as one of the ten primary trends that will shape retail in the years ahead. Moreover, social commerce may generate great opportunities for various businesses in the cyber world and will continue developing into a multiple billion-dollar market worldwide (Shen et al., 2019). Therefore, understanding users’ behaviour toward social commerce is one of the purposes of this study.
As SNSs have become a part of our lives, some negative influences have been studied and identified. For example, a high percentage of younger users have experienced cyberbullying that might cause profound psychosocial conditions, such as depression and anxiety (Wright, 2018). In some studies, depression and anxiety were considered to have similar symptoms, and anxiety was one of the psychological factors influencing users’ behaviour online. Social anxiety influences problematic SNS use through maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (Zsido et al., 2021). Vannucci et al. (2017) examined the relationship between social media use and anxiety in emerging adults and found that more time spent on social media leads to greater symptoms of dispositional anxiety and a higher chance of developing an anxiety disorder. Similar results were found among young adults (Primack et al., 2017) in which the use of multiple social media platforms, in addition to the time spent on social media, is associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety. As a result, social anxiety is becoming one of the key factors having an impact on users in the cyber world. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant impact on individuals’ life and behaviour. Several studies have shown that their subjects suffered from anxiety and psychological distress (Petzold et al., 2020; Zheng et al., 2020). However, no literature is found to focus on social anxiety when studying social commerce. Therefore, one of the purposes of this study is to understand how social anxiety influences users’ behaviour toward social commerce intention. In general, social commerce intention (SCI) is hypothesized to be affected by both online social support and preference for online social interaction that is also the antecedent of online social support (Liang et al., 2011; Oh et al., 2014). Hence, the study investigates how social anxiety moderates the following three relationships: those between preference for online social interaction and SCI, between online social support and SCI, and between preference for online social interaction and online social support.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section contains a review of relevant literature regarding the three constructs of social commerce, social support, and social interaction, followed by social compensation theory and social exchange theory to explain the moderating role of social anxiety on the causal relationships among the three constructs. The next section presents the hypotheses development and followed by methodology including the data collection and hypotheses testing results. The paper ends with the conclusion of the research, reports, the academic and managerial contributions, and discusses limitation and future work.