Social Commerce Adoption Among Handicraft Artisans: An Integrated STOF–TPB Perspective

Social commerce is a significant platform for handicraft artisan vendors to increase sales and expand their market. However, existing research provides limited empirical evidence on handicraft artisan vendors’ intention to adopt social commerce as a business model. This study aims to explore artisan vendors’ intention to adopt social commerce and its determinants by integrating the service, technology, organization, and finance (STOF) model with the theory of planned behavior. A purposive sampling method was used to collect data from 232 Thai handicraft artisan vendors in major tourism cities in Thailand. PLS-SEM was used to test the hypothesized relationships between these constructs and the belief structures of the theory of planned behavior. More specifically, perceived behavioral control has the strongest positive effect on artisan vendors’ intention to adopt social commerce, followed by subjective norms and attitude, whose effects are of similar magnitude. The study contributes by operationalizing the four STOF domains through measurable perceptual constructs and empirically linking them to the theory of planned behavior, thereby extending the application of the STOF model to individual-level adoption research in the traditional handicraft industry. It also offers practical insights for platform providers to design simpler, more user-friendly platforms for artisan vendors.