Abstract
Social commerce represents a new form of electronic commerce that integrates commercial activities, social interactions, and technological infrastructure in a platform. With the prevalence of social media and social networking, social commerce is becoming increasingly popular in both practice and research areas. Whilst the future of social commerce has been promising, the underlying factors, such as social relationships that contribute to the success of social commerce has received relatively little attention from existing literature. This thesis worked towards bridging this gap by examining the formation of trusting relationship in social commerce environment through the lenses of social presence and social support.
Social presence is found to be a core element to relationship building, and some studies found social presence to be positively related to trust. However, there are a number of gaps pertaining to the measures of social presence and its influence on trust within a social commerce context. First of all, existing multidimensional models of social presence do not present an updated and comprehensive perspective of social presence that can appropriately measure the phenomenon within a social commerce environment. Consequently, this thesis set out to model social presence that can fully measure the social presence phenomenon in social commerce.
Furthermore, previous studies have been mostly restricted to examination of social presence as a whole. The presence of different social actors may lead to different responses from users; therefore, the current research examined the effect of social presence of other users on user’s trust toward other users and social presence of seller on trust toward seller. In the same vein, this thesis also assessed the role of perceived social support from different sources (i.e., other users and seller) within social commerce context, hoping to understand its direct influence and moderating effect on trust development. Lastly, there has been little discussion about the trust transferability between trust toward other users, trust toward seller, and trust toward intermediary in social commerce. And this thesis worked towards bridging this gap by examining the relationship among these three targets using trust transfer theory as the underlying mechanism. Besides, this thesis answered the call for research in regards of the examination of the moderator of boundary conditions of trust transfer by investigating the influence of perceived relationship of other users toward seller (PROUS) on trust development, together with its moderating role on trust relationships.
The main study was conducted in the form of a quantitative survey, with data being gathered online. Regarding the influence of social presence on trust development, this thesis found all three dimensions of social presence of other users have positive impact on trust toward other users. However, there were no association between the dimensions of social presence of seller on trust toward seller.
Results from the main study also revealed that high level of perceived social support from other users leads to high level of trust toward other users, and these applied to the relationship between perceived social support from seller and trust toward seller. However, perceived social support have no moderating effects on the relationship between social presence and trust. Finally, the main study found positive relationship among all three targets of trust, which indicates that trust transfer occurred from one target of trust to another within social commerce context. Perceived relationship of other users toward seller (PROUS) has a direct, and positive influence on trust toward seller, however, the results show that this construct does not moderate the relationship between trust toward other users and seller. Overall, findings from the main study contribute to the area of social presence, perceived social support, trust, and social commerce. This thesis also offers useful insights to practitioners on how to cultivate social commerce environment that is well embraced by users and develop strong relationships with them, which will ultimately lead to financial success.