The driving forces of facebook social commerce

Abstract

Trust is viewed as a crucial factor in social commerce due to the prominent role and significant amount of peer-generated contents. The current study aims to investigate the relationship between trust in social commerce and customers’ purchase intentions by providing a mechanism to describe this relationship. Thus, a proposed model is developed based on three concepts: social presence, social commerce information seeking and familiarity with the platform. The model explains the mechanisms through which social commerce information seeking, familiarity, social presence and trust influence customers’ intentions to purchase from social commerce platforms. For the purpose of this study, a survey is designed and distributed to Facebook users. The findings demonstrate that trust in a social networking site has positive influence on purchase intentions. Moreover, trust encourages information seeking, which in turn improves purchase intentions. Furthermore, both social presence and familiarity are found to enhance trust and purchase intentions. According to the findings, several managerial and theoretical implications are highlighted. Particularly, as the first study to investigate the adoption of social commerce among Jordanian customers, this study offers valuable insights and implications for Jordanian firms’ managers and marketers who are targeting direct sales on social networking platforms.