Building E-Commerce Satisfaction and Boosting Sales: The Role of Social Commerce Trust and Its Antecedents

Consumers are relying increasingly on social commerce for making their purchase decisions, and e-vendors have great interests in applying social commerce features in the traditional e-commerce sites to increase sales. Although the importance of trust has been well recognized in the literature, the previous studies have mainly focused on trust in e-commerce sites and failed to incorporate its multidimensional nature to study consumer behavior. To gain further insights into consumer decision-making, this study aims to develop a social commerce trust-based consumer decision-making framework. Based on the social-technical theory, we conceptualize social commerce trust in a multidimensional view including trust in social media, trust in e-commerce sites, trust in social commerce features, and trust in consumers. Data were collected from an online survey taken by U.S. Amazon consumers. Our results strongly support our new conceptualization of social commerce trust and demonstrate its importance by examining its effects on e-commerce outcomes. Further, trust in consumers and trust in social commerce features have stronger effects than trust in e-commerce sites and trust in social media in the formation of social commerce trust. Our study contributes to the theory by introducing the new conceptualization of social commerce trust and advancing our understanding of how to enhance social commerce trust. Practitioners can gain insights into the implementation of social commerce for building consumer trust and increasing sales.