Understanding the Role of Affordances in Promoting Social Commerce Engagement

This study investigates how different types of affordances (i.e., utilitarian, hedonic, and connective) affect users’ platform and social identity and ultimately boost their social commerce engagement. To test our proposed model, we collected longitudinal data from 228 users of the Little Red Book, China’s leading social commerce platform. Results indicate that users’ perception of different affordances with the social commerce platform can influence their identity with the platform and certain social groups differently, which subsequently affect their social commerce engagement behavior. Our study contributes to the identity and the social commerce literature by exploring the roles of both platform and social identity in shaping users’ engagement behavior in the social commerce context.