Social commerce is a rapidly growing platform of e-commerce that utilises social media and online social interaction to build brand awareness and increase sales. Buying and selling through social media can create a reliable and sustainable platform for buyers and vendors, offering an alternative platform to traditional online approaches. Research on social commerce began to achieve traction in 2006 and has grown since with a significant focus from academics who have offered new insight to many of the key topics. This study seeks to offer an additional contribution to the literature by analysing the predictors of consumer adoption of social commerce from existing studies by employing a weight analysis technique. The analysis considered seven dependent variables (along with their best and worst predictors) that are most frequently examined and are relevant to consumer adoption. The review presented in this study suggests that the intention to purchase is the most frequently examined dependent variable and that trust in the social commerce context is a key factor.

Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that utilises social media to facilitate interaction between sellers and consumers. Over the last number of years, the subject of social commerce has attracted significant attention from many researchers as they attempt to understand the factors affecting its adoption by consumers. A review of results from existing studies suggests inconsistent results for many relationships. Hence, this research has conducted a meta-analysis of 65 studies and synthesized the findings from existing studies in order to estimate the cumulative correlation coefficient (β) and significance (p). The investigation found that behavioural intention, trust, perceived usefulness, and social support are frequently examined dependent variables, that are strongly influenced by a number of independent variables. The findings in this study suggests that perceived usefulness, hedonic value, social commerce constructs, subjective norms, informational and emotional support are important for encouraging social commerce adoption. This research highlights various antecedents that have been theoretically examined in different social commerce studies that explore the effect size through meta-analysis.