Friends matter: Will your friends affect how youuse Facebook as an online shopping platform?
Min Chung Han[1]
Kean University
School of Management and Marketing
1000 Morris Ave., Union, NJ 07083 USA
Youjeong Kim
New York Institute of Technology
Department of Communication Arts
1855 Broadway New York, NY 10024 USA
Friends matter: Will your friends affect how youuse Facebook as an online shopping platform?
Social media takes up the biggest chunk of Americans’ online time;the average American spendsabout 37 minutes on social media every day,as part of the daily median 186 minutesof online activities (Fitzgerald, 2014). Most people establish a presenceon social mediato interact with friends. In fact, more than half of those using social media do soto keep in touch with friends (55%), or simply because their friends are on social media (36%) (Geoff, 2015). While following their friends’ activities, social media users often engage in marketing activities, sometimes without even realizing it. Friends’ shared videos, photos and links lead to businesses’ social media pages or corporate home pages. Taking advantage of the marketing effect of social networks, corporations began to transform social media into a new e-commerce platform by embedding “buy” buttons on social media.
Since social media commerce is in a very early stage, several important questions about social media commerce remain to be answered: 1) whether social media users visit social media for buying products if the ‘buy’ option is available, 2) how the users perceive social media commerce (e.g., risky or enjoyable), 3) how friends would actually influence the user’s perception, and 4) whether there are any gender differences in perceiving social media as a new e-commerce platform.
Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether sharing friends’ purchase history will affect Facebook users’ acceptance of social media as an online commerce platform,as well as whether it will affect social media users’risk perceptionofsocial media commerce. Furthermore, this study also seeks to determine how social media users’ perceived enjoyment of social media commerce affects their purchase intentions, social media commerce acceptance, and purchase history sharing intention. This study also attempts to determine if there are any gender differences in perceiving social media as a new e-commerce platform, since several researchers have revealed gender differences in online shopping behavior (e.g., see Rodgers & Harris, 2003) as well as social media use (Correa, Hinsley, & De Zuniga, 2010).
To answer the research questions, this study employed a 2 (friends’ purchase history present vs. notpresent) x 2 (male vs. female) between-subject online survey. Two different versions of Facebook mock-up pages were created to featurea randomizedproduct image. The survey participants (N=152;male =54, female =98) were given two different Facebook pages, with one showing friends’ purchase history of a product with the specific product image, and the other not showing friends’ purchase history with the product. The respondents’ perceived risk, enjoyment, purchase intention, social media commerce acceptance, and intention to share purchase historywerethen measured.
The study employed both ANOVA and multiple regression analysis. The results demonstratedthat women showed a higher perceived risk toward social media commerce than men, which is consistent with online purchasing risk perception (Garbarino & Strahukevitz, 2004).One interesting finding was that the absence of friends’ purchase history induced a higher perception of enjoyment of social media commerce. This means that participants who did not view a friend’s purchase history of the specific product found that e-commerce on Facebook was more enjoyable than participants who viewed a friend’s purchase history with the product.
The results also indicated that perceived enjoyment had a significant primary effect on purchase intention, social media commerce acceptance, and purchase history sharing intention on Facebook. In other words, as participants find social media commerce more enjoyable, they are more likely to purchase items on Facebook, to accept social media commerce, and to share their purchase history with their friends on Facebook.
We also foundthat perceived risk negatively affected the intention to share purchase history. That is,if the participants perceive social media commerce to be risky, they are less likely to share their purchase history with their friends on Facebook.
These findings suggest that making social media commerce as enjoyable as possible might be a key to successful social media commerce.
[1]Corresponding Author