Some things are just better rich: how social commerce feature richness affects consumers’ buying intention via social factors

Abstract

The social commerce discipline has produced several different social commerce features that can be integrated into e-commerce platforms. Thereby, it is assumed that using multiple social commerce features in combination can better stimulate consumers’ social interactions. Yet, little is known about the effects of such strategies. This paper introduces the concept of social commerce feature richness and investigates its effects on consumers’ buying intention via social factors. The results of a controlled online experiment, in which 237 participants used variants of an e-commerce platform with functionally diverse social commerce feature sets, confirm that the social commerce feature richness positively affects social factors, which increase consumers’ buying intention. With the social commerce feature richness, we provide a novel, theoretically grounded and empirically verified concept to better understand how the use of functionally richer sets of social commerce features can maximize the success of social commerce initiatives.