Understanding factors affecting social commerce purchase behavior: A longitudinal perspective

The use of social media has experienced a surge in popularity globally in recent years, with a rapidly increasing rate of adoption. Retailers are experimenting with various strategies to promote their products and services to customers, taking advantage of the popularity of these websites. Nevertheless, there is significant controversy within the scholarly and practitioners regarding the main motivations of consumers purchase behavior in the social commerce (SC) setting, as well as the effective techniques that may make them a viable alternative for future business endeavors. Drawing upon value motivation theory and prior research on privacy/security in the SC setting, our study developed an integrated model to understand the impact of utilitarian value, hedonic value, perceived privacy/security, and trust at social commerce platform (SCP) on purchase intentions via social media over time. This study employed two-wave data (“T = 736 and T+1 = 601†) and used the “cross-lagged panel†technique to analyze the “longitudinal data†. The results of this study offer meaningful insights about the cause-and-effect relationship and significant effect of utilitarian value, hedonic value, and perceived privacy/security on consumer trust and purchase intentions. Furthermore, it suggests that customer trust plays a mediating role on these relationships over time. This study offers meaningful implication for theory and practice.