Social shopping, as an extension of traditional e-commerce (Zhang and Benyoucef, 2016), has become an industry that enjoys high user growth rates and receives considerable venture capital (Olbrich and Holsing, 2011). The potential value that social shopping brings to marketing has aroused great interest among researchers in recent years (Shen, 2012; Hsiao et al., 2010). Nevertheless, compared to the enthusiasm from academia and capital markets toward this business mode, social shopping websites (SSW) are not running smoothly in China. Both Mogujie.com and Melishuo.com, as the most popular Chinese SSWs, are struggling through painful structural adjustments and experiencing a hard time in reaping expected profits from investment in creating a social environment embedded within online shopping. This leads to a call for a better understanding of how the social components of online shopping can gain a foothold. Among the many influencing factors that were identified by prior studies, value perception has been recognized as the most important one that influences shoppers’ online shopping decision (Coker et al., 2014; Verhagen et al., 2011). Value perception is crucial and is suggested to be multi-dimensional (Sweeney and Soutar, 2001). Although different classification has been put forward by prior studies to clarify its dimensions, two value perceptions (hedonic and utilitarian) emerged as the basis for the study of the multi-dimensional nature of consumer’s value perception (Sweeney and Soutar, 2001). Taking utilitarian and hedonic value as the major higher-level value category, specific sub-dimensions were further put forward to capture these two in the online shopping context (To et al., 2007). Among those sub-dimensions identified by the scholars, the role of social value was still in an ambiguity. Prior research usually treats the satisfaction of shoppers’ socialization need either as a lower level construct contributing to hedonic motivation or as one of the sub-dimensions of hedonic value (Chiu et al., 2014; Rintamäki et al., 2006; Turel et al., 2010). Yet, the traditional pure hedonic perspective toward social value may fail to capture the full picture of its innate nature and the real purpose of shoppers’ socialization need. The socialization need can also be oriented toward utilitarianism as people also socialize to realize their self-referent utilitarian benefit (Wright, 1984). Besides, previous studies on the relationship between social value and purchase intention yield a mix of positive, negative, and null results (Kang and Johnson, 2015; Ozen and Engizek, 2014; To et al., 2007). Combined with the conflicting reports on the influences of social value in consumers’ online shopping decision, the enhanced awareness of satisfying users’ socialization need in the online world (Kang and Johnson, 2015) causes concern about whether it is essential and legitimate to treat social value as an independent major value dimension. Therefore, a further exploration of the role of social value and its relative position in the network of value perception dimensions is needed to avoid overestimating or underappreciating its importance.