On the Factors Influencing Consumers' Adoption of Social Commerce - A Review of the Empirical Literature

Abstract

Social commerce, the combination of e-commerce activities and social media, is a lucrative means for e-commerce companies to increase their sales volumes. As social commerce initiatives considerably depend on the consumers’ social interactions, it becomes important for companies to understand how consumers can be stimulated to participate in social commerce. While several empirical studies have already focused on investigating what factors influence consumers to adopt to social commerce, the findings of these studies are scattered across the literature base, sometimes not transparent, and not straightforwardly comparable. To synthesize these findings, we conduct a systematic review of the empirical literature on the consumers’ adoption of social commerce. In particular, we identify and classify conceptually similar factors and outcome variables (i.e., behavioral intentions and/or behaviors). Moreover, we apply a votecounting technique and a sign test to aggregate the reported effects between the factors and outcome variables. After analyzing 61 academic publications, we contribute a structured and comprehensive list of factors and their potential effects on various adoption-related outcome variables. Our results reveal that for some factors, such as trust, usefulness, or social influence, the effects point in a clear direction, while for several other factors, such as enjoyment, risk, or social presence, the effects are yet not clear and require further investigations.