The Role of Social Commerce on Consumer Decisions: A Theoretical Foundation

Abstract

The advent of social commerce phenomenon has largely started gaining attention in consumer behavior literature. Apparently, social commerce has shifted more power from the seller to the buyer and predominately fueled to strengthen e-commerce acceptance. Thus, understanding consumer behavior in the context of social commerce adoption has become inevitable for business organizations that aim at elevating their bottom-line, competitiveness and ensuring sustainability. Moreover, social ties facilitated in social commerce enable trust as the most promising benefit while alleviating the perceived risk, which was the major striking concerns with online commerce over the years. Though examining the influence of social commerce on consumer behavior and decision making is started getting scholarly attention recently, adequate explanatory model laid on the relevant theoretical foundation in this regard is still fragmented. Consequently, researchers constructed this theoretical foundation with the intention of enriching extant literature and to lay a formal groundwork for investigating this phenomenon. Hence, this paper aimed to comprehend: the nature of online social networks, emerging social commerce phenomenon, the role of social support in social commerce and influence of social commerce on consumer decisions respectively.