Customers Purchase Intention in Social Commerce: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

As the use of the internet has become massive, social networking sites cannot be separated from the lives of Indonesian people. Social networking sites have succeeded in facilitating online business activities. That fact drives social networking sites to transform their function and features to become a rival of electronic commerce. We call this transformation social commerce. Social commerce can help customers to do online shopping on social media without losing other features of social media. The advantages of social commerce encourage platform managers and entrepreneurs to optimize this platform. Purchase intention of customers is an important aspect to increase the number of purchases in the social commerce platform. This study was conducted to analyze the characteristics and purchase intentions of Indonesian social commerce customers. By knowing those things, platform managers and entrepreneurs will gain better insight and create strategies to get benefits from social commerce. This research was conducted by using a descriptive study. 250 data were collected using an online questionnaire. The results show that the majority of social commerce customers are women. The majority of customers are aged 22 until 30 years old. Most of them are students who spend less than 500,000 Rupiah in one month to buy something in social commerce. Those customers do online shopping by using social commerce about 2-3 times per month with fashion as the most preferred product to purchase. Most of them use Instagram as the most efficient social commerce platform.