The role of social support on relationship quality and social commerce

Empowered by social media, individuals are active content creators in social networking sites. This has brought new changes in business environment, of which social commerce is one of them. Social commerce, a new stream in e-commerce, highlights the role of technological advancements to develop a new social commerce era. In social commerce era, individuals share their knowledge, experiences, and information about the products and services with peers, providing a supportive environment in an online context. Drawn from social support theory, relationship quality, and social media concept this research proposes a model to investigate the role of social factors that impact on relationship quality and social commerce intention. A survey conducted on Facebook, a popular social networking site, and PLS-SEM method was applied to empirically test the proposed model. The results offer a valuable picture of social factors that influence relationship quality and social commerce intention. Towards these ends, the study highlights a new picture of consumers' behaviour in social commerce era. It provides a new theory in the area of research - social commerce. Practical implications of the research also highlight new technological changes in e-commerce platform and provide new strategies to firms to adopt these new technological advancements. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.