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

Authors: Zheng Zhang; HongQian Wang

Addresses: Business School, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, No. 334, Jun Gong Road, Shanghai 200093, China ' Business School, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, No. 334, Jun Gong Road, Shanghai 200093, China

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.

Keywords: mobile social commerce; purchasing intention: theory of planned behaviour; TPB; perceived value; social tie; perceived usefulness; social influence; experience; stated preference survey; SP survey.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2019.098063

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2019 Vol.17 No.2, pp.191 - 212

Received: 11 Jul 2017
Accepted: 30 Oct 2017
Published online: 01 Mar 2019 *

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