Towards a model of social commerce: improving the effectiveness of e-commerce through leveraging social media tools based on consumers’ dual roles

Social media has been integrated into traditional e-commerce, creating an innovative technology-based approach to changing business practice and service, yet few researchers have attempted to provide an understanding of how this approach is changing consumer decision-making and purchase behaviours. Combining the expectation-confirmation theory and the expectation-confirmation model and information systems continuance, we propose a model for social commerce, illustrating how social media is utilised in online shopping as a three-fold process (pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages) from a consumer perspective. The model consists of three phases: social commerce motivation, social commerce adoption, and e-commerce effectiveness. Using two rounds of surveys, we find that (1) autonomous motivation and controlled motivation have positive effects on social commerce information seeking and sharing, and (2) social commerce information seeking formulates consumers’ pre-purchase decisions, thus affecting their actual purchase outcomes, repurchase intentions, and social commerce information-sharing intentions in the post-purchase stage. In addition, our study indicates that consumers may play dual roles in social commerce: as information seekers in the pre-purchase stage and as information providers in the post-purchase stage. Our findings have important implications for literature and practice.