PurposeThis study aims to explore how a buyer's perceived buyer-seller (B-S) guanxi facets (i.e. ganqing, renqing and mianzi) and guanxi positions (i.e. zi-ji-ren, shou-ren and sheng-ren) affect the seller's influence effectiveness (SIE) and purchase intention (PI) in social commerce.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted an online survey in three cities of Taiwan and collected a total of 364 data. The structural equation modeling and cluster analysis were used to test research hypotheses.FindingsThe results indicate that (1) each guanxi facet exerts a different and positive impact on SIE, but only one guanxi facet – renqing – helps improve PI, (2) guanxi facets can be used to predict the buyer's perceived guanxi position toward the seller, (3) the effect of guanxi facets on SIE and PI varies across B-S guanxi positions and (4) the SIE positively mediates effects of guanxi facets on the PI.Originality/valueThis study demonstrates the individual effect of each guanxi facet on SIE and PI and affirms the implicit guanxi position features guanxi facets and determines the buyer's perceived SIE and PI as well. To the best of our knowledge, these findings are rarely proposed in previous research and are beneficial for understanding the guanxi mechanism in social commerce.

One of key issues in patent analysis is identifying time interval for querying patent records from databases. Inquiring patents with inappropriate time interval will lead to biased results that either emphasizes old patents or cannot reveal the structure of a technology area. The study proposed a systematic method for deciding the inquiring time interval, based on the patent's obsolescence cycle. Two USPC classes are analyzed for demonstrating. For including at least of 90% of survival patents, the study suggests the time interval of 9.2 years for the pure USPC 257 class. Use the time interval of 7.0 years for patents in the pure USPC 438 class. Use the time interval of 7.5 years for patents classified both in the USPC 257 and 438 classes.

This study explores how social influence approaches alter buyer–seller swift guanxi, trust in the seller and repurchase intention when considering the influence of buyer dependence. Based on the results of an online survey in three cities of Taiwan, we empirically test the research model using partial least squares analysis. We found that buyer dependence exerts different but positive effects on each social influence approach usage and only the identification approach contributes to buyer–seller swift guanxi, trust in the seller and repurchase intention. The buyer–seller swift guanxi also mediates the effects of the identification approach and trust in the seller on repurchase intention. This study clarifies the role of buyer dependence on the seller’s social influence approaches and buyer–seller swift guanxi in the online C2C marketplace context. A seller should exploit buyer dependence, learn how to use each social influence approach and develop close buyer-seller swift guanxi, then repurchase intention can be secured.

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