Enhancing the flow experience of consumers in China through interpersonal interaction in social commerce
Introduction
Social commerce is an emerging business trend that is growing rapidly in China. According to the 2015 McKinsey report, consumers in China spend 78 min per day on social commerce. Approximately 50% of customers in China make their purchase decisions according to recommendations from relatives and friends. In recent years, the virtual experiences of customers in the social commerce context have gained importance. Providing consumers with unforgettable experiences has emerged as an important issue in driving customer participation and developing favorable consumer behavior responses in social commerce (Huang and Benyoucef, 2014, Zhang et al., 2014).
When considering the provision of online consumption experiences, scholars have highlighted the importance of flow (Chang, 2013, Faiola et al., 2013). Flow is a state of concentration in which people are so involved that nothing else matters (Gao & Bai, 2014). Specifically, flow refers to a temporarily unaware experience in which an individual engages in a social shopping activity in a social shopping website with total concentration, control, and enjoyment (Gao & Bai, 2014). In emphasizing the importance of flow and the formation of compelling experiences, Hoffman and Novak (1996) went as far as declaring that “creating a commercially compelling website depends on facilitating a state of flow for consumers [and that] … an important objective for marketers is to provide these opportunities” (Hoffman & Novak, 1996, p. 66). Zhang et al. (2014) argued that enhancing the flow experience is essential for the survival of social commerce. Despite the understanding of the contribution of flow to the creation of compelling experiences, investigating the drivers of customer flow experiences is important for the success of social shopping sites, however, little effort has been devoted to studying the factors contributing to flow experience in social commerce. In order to fill this gap, the present study is trying to explore the formation drivers of flow in social commerce.
With the growing competition, online vendors rely on web atmospherics to create an environment that can produce positive emotional and cognitive states of online shoppers (Gao and Bai, 2014, Zhang et al., 2014). Chang (2013) suggested that social interaction among members in social networking sites would yield a state of flow. In the social commerce context, interpersonal interactional factors have received much attention (Hsiao et al., 2010, Liao et al., 2010, Lu et al., 2010). Social commerce involves using social media to support social interaction, and its unique characteristics provide opportunities for consumers to make better buying decisions (Ng, 2013). Carlson and O'Cass (2011) posited that future studies should explore the effects of consumer-based variables on the formation of flow experience. However, to our knowledge, little is known about the interpersonal interaction factors that promote the flow experience for customers in social commerce.
Drawing from the above literature review, we infer that investigating the impact of interpersonal interaction factors on the creation of flow experience should be a promising research area in social commerce. On the basis of Liao et al. (2010) study, three interpersonal interaction factors are investigated, namely, perceived expertise of group members, similarity of group members, and familiarity of group members. As the context of our research is similar to the virtual community context, we focus on these three interpersonal interaction factors. Therefore, this study draws on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model to investigate the impact of the three interpersonal attraction factors on the flow experience and the relationship between flow experience and purchase intention.
This research makes important contributions to the extant literature. First, we extend the extant literature by testing and validating a model by incorporating interpersonal drivers of flow experience in social commerce. Second, our data analysis reveals significant differences between young and old users. Third, the present study advances the understanding that interpersonal interaction factors remain important in the context of social commerce. Fourth, our research provides empirical evidence to the deduction that interpersonal interaction factors positively affect purchase intention through flow experience in social commerce.
Section snippets
SOR framework
The SOR model is extensively used in studies that measure the impact of perceived website features on consumer responses (Gao and Bai, 2014, Zhang et al., 2014). According to the SOR model, environmental stimuli (S) influence consumer internal states (O) and correspondingly affect consumers' overall responses (R). Donovan and Rossiter (1982) proposed a model that is adapted to the retail context. The model treats atmospheric cues as stimuli, two major emotional states as organism, and shopping
Measurement development
In this study, the items used in the survey were adapted from existing research to fit the context of social commerce. We followed the generally accepted suggestion on wording questions when developing and finalizing the questionnaire (Fang et al., 2014). Perceived similarity was measured using four items adapted from Liao et al. (2010). Items for perceived expertise and familiarity were also adapted from Liao et al. (2010). Items for flow were adapted from Zhang et al. (2014). Items for
Common method bias
When all data were perceptual and collected from a single source at the same point of time, the issue of common method bias might be a threat to the validity of the research (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). In our study, common method bias was examined using Harman's single factor test. The analysis finally showed that all the items can be categorized into five factors, and the first factor explains only 14.85% of the variance. These results suggested that common method bias was
Discussion and conclusion
This study explores the role of flow experience in influencing customers' purchase intention in social shopping sites based on the SOR framework from the perspective of interpersonal interaction. According to Liao et al. (2010), we classify interpersonal attraction factors into perceived expertise, similarity, and familiarity. Then, we investigate the differences in the influence of three interpersonal interaction factors on flow experience and the impact of flow experience on purchase
Limitations and future directions
Our study has several limitations. First, this study was conducted with data collected from a social shopping site in China. The results of this study might be different had the model been retested in a different context or in a different cultural environment. In the future, scholars should further test and validate our findings in different contexts and cultural environments. Second, because of the features of the focal social shopping sites in the study, the participants of this study were
Theoretical implications
Our study makes important contributions to the existing literature. First, this study extends the extant literature by testing and validating a model that incorporates interpersonal drivers of flow experience in social commerce. Flow experience is proved to be an important predictor of social commerce participation (Zhang et al., 2014). Moreover, interpersonal interaction factors play a useful role in the context of virtual community, which is similar to the social commerce. Only a few studies
Acknowledgements
The work described in this paper was supported by the grants from “the National Natural Science Foundation of China” (NSFC: 71571169, 71571177, 71201150, and 71332001); and supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (WK2040000009).
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