۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Theoretical background

۳٫ Study 1: Qualitative study

۴٫ Study 2: Quantitative study

۵٫ Hypotheses testing

۶٫ Discussion

Acknowledgements

Appendix. A: Questionnaire items

Appendix B:. Common method bias analysis

References

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of social media, consumers are increasingly generating and sharing content, facilitating the growth of social commerce sites. Studies have explored the factors driving consumers’ adoption of social commerce, but relatively few of them have investigated the role of sociability. Because sociability determines how users interact and the conceptualization of sociability remains unclear, this study extended the research of Preece by identifying seven elements of three subdimensions of sociability through focus-group discussions. The partial-least-squares analysis results suggested that the purposes, policies, and people aspects of sociability positively affect trust in product recommendations. In addition, the results from fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis revealed that all the elements of the subdimensions of sociability appear as conditions in one or more paths, and none of the conditions is present in all the causal paths identified. The results provide valuable information for academics and practitioners seeking to increase consumer trust through sociability

Introduction

With the growing popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, consumers are increasingly producing and sharing content (Ko, 2018). Traditional e-commerce, which once focused on one-way browsing, has transformed into social commerce, which offers a consumer-oriented environment. Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that combines social networking with shopping or transactions (Alshibly, 2014; Shen, 2012). With the aid of social networking capabilities, social commerce sites offer “user-generated content” mechanisms such as comments, feedbacks, reviews, and tags that help customers share their purchasing experiences (Li and Ku, 2018). In contrast with the recommendations of merchants, recommendations by friends or indirect acquaintances are considered more accurate and trustworthy (Bai et al., 2015). Social commerce sites can be distinguished from e-commerce sites in the following three aspects. First, customers interact with e-commerce platforms as individuals, whereas social commerce sites encourage conversations and interactions between customers (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). Second, customers have little control on e-commerce sites, which provide only one-way browsing, whereas customers on social commerce sites are empowered to create collaborative and interactive online experiences (Huang and Benyoucef, 2015). Third, the design of e-commerce sites is product- or catalog-centered to maximize shopping efficiency, but social commerce sites provide user- or customer- centered interfaces to motivate social activities (Huang and Benyoucef, 2015; Shadkam and O’Hara, 2013). More specifically, social commerce sites facilitate social interaction by encouraging consumer participation (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). Because customer participation leads to enrichment of consumer-generated content, social commerce sites attract more consumers, who share their experiences and leverage other customers’ expertise (Yang et al., 2015).