How online social ties and product-related factors influence purchasing intention in mobile social commerce context?

Abstract

With the rapid growth of social media platforms and mobile devices, the mobile social commerce changes consumers' purchasing behaviour. A theoretical model based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and perceived value theory is developed to investigate the purchasing intention within mobile social commerce context. The stated preference (SP) survey is conducted to collect data through nine hypothetical scenarios generated by the orthogonal configuration of four control factors. We targeted at people with WeChat account and total 1809 observations have been gathered. The results indicate that perceived social tie strength and social influence positively affect the intention to purchase. Furthermore, there exists an inverse U-shaped relationship between perceived usefulness and purchasing intention. The practical model further demonstrates that the purchasing intention is relatively high when perceived usefulness is moderate and the factors of perceived social tie strength, social influence and product price could slightly influence purchasing intention in the condition of low level perceived usefulness.