You Recommend, I Buy

Abstract

As an emerging business phenomenon especially in China, instant messaging (IM) based social commerce is growing increasingly popular, attracting hundreds of millions of users and is becoming one important way where people make everyday purchases. Such platforms embed shopping experiences within IM apps, e.g., WeChat, WhatsApp, where real-world friends post and recommend products from the platforms in IM group chats and quite often form lasting recommending/buying relationships. How and why do users engage in IM based social commerce? Do such platforms create novel experiences that are distinct from prior commerce? And do these platforms bring changes to user social lives and relationships? To shed light on these questions, we launched a qualitative study where we carried out semi-structured interviews on 12 instant messaging based social commerce users in China. We showed that IM based social commerce: 1) enables more reachable, cost-reducing, and immersive user shopping experience, 2) shapes user decision-making process in shopping through pre-existing social relationship, mutual trust, shared identity, and community norm, and 3) creates novel social interactions, which can contribute to new tie formation while maintaining existing social relationships. We demonstrate that all these unique aspects link closely to the characteristics of IM platforms, as well as the coupling of user social and economic lives under such business model. Our study provides important research and design implications for social commerce, and decentralized, trusted socio-technical systems in general.

Wrist-bound Guanxi, Jiazu, and Kuolie: Unpacking Chinese Adolescent Smartwatch-Mediated Socialization

“…Addressing the Western-centric bias, a growing body of HCI research has ventured into understanding the specific cultural nuances that characterize technology-mediated communication in China [18,23,58,[81][82][83]138]. However, the current body of research on children's technology-mediated socialization is heavily skewed towards Western contexts.…”

Consumers’ purchase behavior in short food supply chains using social commerce in Indonesia

“…producers, intermediary and consumers) are members. Instant messaging affords more accessibility and intimacy among consumers, is more immersive and cost-reducing, and exerts greater social influence (Cao et al, 2020). For a comparison, Drejerska and colleagues find that the social media platform Facebook is primarily used by producers to share information, but the interactions (i. e. comments and sharing) between farmers and consumers are limited (Drejerska et al, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, it has been shown that facilitating information-seeking about SFSCs by consumers is important (Elghannam et al, 2017), particularly those who consider sustainability in their purchase decisions (Torquati et al, 2016). Social commerce facilitates social relationship such as knowledge exchange between parties which has a positive impact on purchasing and consumption behavior (de Bernardi et al, 2019), increases consumer confidence when choosing a product (Vermeir and Verbeke, 2008) and simplifies consumers purchase decision (Cao et al, 2020). Therefore, social commerce has a role in social and economic sustainability.…”

Engaging customers with online restaurant community through mutual disclosure amid the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of customer trust and swift guanxi

“…Specifically, supported by online restaurant communities built on free social platforms, restaurants can easily reach their customers at a much lower cost, more directly and closely than traditional business-to-consumer e-commerce platforms, such as Meituan, Dianping ( Daxueconsulting, 2020 ). Such online restaurant communities are usually based on customers’ real-world social networks, in which customer power is quite strong ( Cao et al, 2021 ). Typical scenarios of online restaurant communities are shown in Appendix.…”