The role of trust in information adoption in social commerce: A PLS approach

Abstract

Social commerce (s-commerce or SC) is rapidly growing and it is an increasingly favourite shopping way that customers adopt. Based on the view of trust as a social reality and Petty & Cacioppo’s (1986) ELM theory, the paper proposes a theoretical model integrating information quality and social support to explain information adoption through perceived consumer trust. A survey with PLS-SEM analysis of 333 consumers shows that 7 out of 11 hypotheses are empirically supported and the model explains up to 47.4% of consumer information adoption. Moreover, as expected, the information quality of s-commerce sites is always to be present to build consumer trust in s-commerce sites and in members of s-commerce sites.