The rise of social media has created a new e-commerce platform called social commerce. In social commerce, e-vendors such as Amazon may integrate social media with their traditional e-commerce sites. Based on self-determination theory and social commerce literature, we develop a model illustrating how social commerce features may impact consumer behaviors and facilitate social commerce benefits from the extrinsic motivation perspective. We identify four types of extrinsic motivation including external motivation, introjected motivation, identified motivation, and integrated motivation; and we examine their influences on consumers’ intention to contribute social commerce information, which in turn leads to their subsequent behaviors and increases the perceived benefit of social commerce. We also consider the moderating effect of gender in the formulation of social commerce benefits. Based on longitudinal survey data from Amazon consumers, we find that 1) consumers’ external and identified motivation has a positive impact on intention to contribute social commerce information; 2) consumers’ intention is positively associated with their future behaviors, which in turn facilitate their perceptions of social commerce benefits; and 3) gender moderates the impact of behavior on social commerce benefits.

Introduction

The intersection of social media and traditional e-commerce has given the rise of a new world, social commerce. As a new form of ecommerce, social commerce facilitates new channels for consumers to improve not only their purchase decisions but also shopping experiences via its primary features, such as user interactions and user-generated content (e.g., Alalwan, Rana, Dwivedi, & Algharabat, 2017; Dwivedi, Kapoor, & Chen, 2015; Hajli, 2015; Kapoor et al., 2018; Kim & Kim, 2018; Liang, Ho, Li, & Turban, 2011; Ng, 2013; Zhang, Guo, Hu, & Liu, 2017). Social commerce offers an innovative channel for enterprises to build brand loyalty and promote sales through customer engagement in social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook (Lee, Lee, & Oh, 2015; Zheng, Cheung, Lee, & Liang, 2015). Social commerce thus provides a social media-based approach for business practices and has gained increasing attention from researchers. Therefore, capturing the essence of consumer behaviors in social commerce is essential for both researchers and practitioners to gain insights into the implementation of social commerce (Zhang & Benyoucef, 2016). Consumer behaviors may vary depending on specific social commerce scenarios, including adding commercial features into social media and/or adding social media features into traditional e-commerce (Huang & Benyoucef, 2013; Liang et al., 2011; Lin, Li, & Wang, 2017; Zhang & Benyoucef, 2016).