Exploring the Role of Technical Features in Promoting the Intention to Continue Sharing Contents in Social Commerce Platform

Abstract

For this paper, we’d like to explore the role of the technical features on the users’ continuous intention to share contents in the social commerce platform based on social cognition theory. The social commerce is an emerging e-commerce platform along with the development of social media technology. Compared with traditional e-commerce, user’s content sharing has been recognized as the most important resource for the social commerce platform to attract new users as well as help old users make a better purchase decision. Drawing on the literature of the Social Cognition theory, the intention to continue sharing contents, the technical support of social commerce, the author develops a new model to understand the mechanism of the user’s intention to continue sharing contents and uses the SEM to test the model. Results show that technical support has a positive influence on the intention to continue sharing content, also increases the level of self-efficacy perception and outcome expectations, which in turn increases users’ intention to share contents. Implications, limitations, discussion, and future research directions are discussed at the end of the paper.