Traffic transfer between social media and E-commerce platform: the role of social media affordances

The traffic transfer between social media and E-commerce platforms is essential to the retailers in the E-commerce platform and the platform itself. Drawing on the affordance theory, this study presents the results from three experiments based on two kinds of social media (with or without E-commerce widow) to demonstrate the role of social media recommendation pages’ affordance on the visitors’ usage and sharing intention to the product link attached to the content. The result shows that traffic transfer exists between social media and E-commerce platforms. Moreover, the higher the level of social media affordances (visibility, editability, persistence, association), the higher the willingness of visitors to transfer from social media to E-commerce platforms. This change in traffic volume is mediated by the visitors’ relationship strength and perceived trust in the blogger and the platform. This study expands the research on affordance theory to the area of traffic transfer. Additionally, this study has also enriched the existing literature on cross-platform traffic imports in social E-commerce. The results will guide both content operators and retailers who wish to use social media to increase sales.