An Empirical Study of Social E-commerce Platform on Users' Intention: Take WeChat E-commerce Group as an Example

Abstract

Social e-commerce is an important e-commerce platform that has developed along with social network platforms. Recently, social e-commerce platforms have become popular shopping channels for young people due to their sociability and interactivity. To understand what affects users’ intention to social e-commerce and knowledge sharing in the social platform, we conduct an empirical study in the WeChat e-commerce group, a typical social platform. In this paper, the research model is integrated according to social support theory and expectation confirmation models. In our empirical study, we design an online questionnaire based on a mature scale and 217 valid samples are collected. To further verify the proposed hypotheses, reliability and validity analysis, and the Structural Equation Model (SEM) are adopted. The results prove that social support has a great influence on social e-commerce, and at the same time, as the intermediary variable between social support and user intention, satisfaction and expectation confirmation will ultimately affect users’ social e-commerce and knowledge-sharing intention positively. According to the experimental results, several management suggestions are provided.