What creates trust and who gets loyalty in social commerce?

Abstract

With the spread of smartphones and the growth of Internet retailing, new possibilities for social commerce have opened up within existing social network services (SNSs). Within SNSs, any individual can sell and promote goods as a retailer. Therefore, unlike in other electronic commerce, consumers' trust in the individual vendor has become important, and now the individual vendors can make their customers loyal to them rather than to the platform. For the purpose, in this study we determine whether the trust of both platform and individual vendor affects customers' attitudes and accumulates customer loyalty. In addition, we categorize word-of-mouth into heuristic and systematic groups and investigate the effect of those factors on the intention to buy and on actual purchasing behavior. The results show that the individual vendor's trust has no significant effect but customer loyalty is accumulated by individual vendors. In addition, heuristic factors have a significant effect on purchasing behavior, whereas systematic factors have a significant effect on attitude and intention to buy.