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.

Introduction

The emergence and development of the Internet brought commerce into the online world. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has made it easier for consumers to find information about goods and compare prices. In addition, vendors can now more easily market themselves and their products by using the Internet. Based on these advantages, according to Meeker (2018), e-commerce exceeded 14% of US retailing in 2018, and according to the 1421 Consulting Group (2018), China’s ecommerce transactions are expected to exceed $1 trillion by the end of 2019. However, e-commerce became commonplace only by overcoming there were many obstacles. The biggest hurdle was how to provide trust to consumers (Reichheld and Schefter, 2000). Within the e-commerce environment, the consumer must trust the vendor more than in off-line purchases because the consumer cannot directly identify the purchase, decision, payment, and delivery processes (Christine Roy et al., 2001). Therefore, Gefen (2000), Jarvenpaa et al. (1998), Jarvenpaa et al. (1999), McKnight et al. (2000) and other have studied the concept of trust in e-commerce. According to Doney and Cannon (1997) and Gefen and Straub (2004), consumers are more influenced by their trust in providers for shopping platforms such as Amazon.com and eBay, as opposed to smaller vendors, because small-scale vendors are more limited in their ability to provide trust to consumers. Large platform providers are also more successful in gaining consumer loyalty after the purchase. Because of customer loyalty, 66% of Amazon.com sales are from repurchasing customers (The Economist, 2000), and eBay is attracting new customers because of its referral system based on loyal existing customers (Reichheld and Schefter, 2000).