Investigating female customer's impulse buying in Facebook B2C social commerce: An experimental study

Abstract

Along with the popularity of social network sites, social commerce such as Facebook has rapidly become a promising platform to conduct online advertisings and business activities. Drawing from Latent State-Trait theory (LST), we conducted an online experiment to empirically investigate the impact of information quality, picture of product presentation, the number of people's “Likes” and impulsiveness on female customer's urge to buy impulsively as well as the interaction effect of environmental cues and individual trait. The results showed that information quality, picture of product presentation, and impulsiveness positively affected the urge to buy impulsively. Contrary to our expectation, only information quality was found to interact with impulsiveness to jointly influence impulsive buying behavior, while the interaction of impulsiveness with product presentation and the number of likes was insignificant. The findings not only help to enrich our understanding of important factors influencing impulse buying within Facebook B2C social commerce but also offer social commerce practitioners a better strategy in selling their products and services, specifically for female customers.