The Influence Of Trust On Social Commerce Intent Of Instagram Users

Social commerce is a new form of social media-mediated commerce that allows customers to participate actively in the marketing and selling of products in online marketplaces. Social media such as Instagram provides a digital trade platform for their users. It is important for social commerce vendors to know the antecedents of social commerce intent. Trust is one of the important antecedents and it is also critical to build trust. The aim of this study is to propose and validate a research model including trust and its antecedents (product differentiation and reputation) and measure the influence of trust on social commerce intent on Instagram users by means of PLS-Sem. The research sample consists of Instagram users who bought anything from Instagram in the last three months. Data were collected in the months of December of 2017 and January of 2018. A total of 289 survey responses from participants, were collected. Based on the initial screening of the collected questionnaires, 31 of them were excluded as they were inappropriate. This study provides useful implications for both academics and practitioners in digital economy. PLS-Sem method was used to test the research model. The scale of Yahia et al. (2018) was adapted for all of the antecedents. The findings of the research showed that all of the antecedents were found to have statistically significant influence on social commerce intent of Instagram users. According to the modelling results several digital marketing strategies were proposed.