A Multiplatform Study of Social Commerce Success: Theoretical Development and Empirical Validation
Xiaolin Lin, Saonee Sarker, Mauricio Featherman, and Xuequn Wang
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 29, Number 1, 2025, pp. 4-38.
Abstract:
Social commerce, as a subcategory of electronic commerce, leverages social media features to support consumers’ e-shopping and transaction activities. As social commerce has become quite popular, companies often engage with consumers via multiple social commerce sites, which requires them to follow different strategies on these sites. However, previous literature has generally assumed that social commerce is a homogeneous phenomenon and consumers behave similarly across different social commerce sites. Therefore, such theorizing provides few insights regarding how firms can interact with consumers across different social commerce sites. Our study proposes a contextualized model of social commerce success that examines seven variables—system quality, information quality, relationship quality, social support, perceived value, consumer satisfaction, and consumer co-creation—to compare social commerce sites comprehensively and evaluate their differences. We collected survey data from two popular social commerce sites: Facebook brand page and Amazon. Our study shows that these two social commerce sites have important differences. For example, whereas information quality is more important on Amazon, relationship quality and social support are more vital on Facebook brand page. Our study contributes to the literature by theorizing how social commerce sites differ. Our study also demonstrates how information systems (IS) success models may be adaptable to new contexts and business models. Practically, it delivers insights for companies into how social commerce can be used as a strategic tool to engage customers and sustain business.