Social Media Commerce: Next Frontier in Online Shopping Focused on Chinese Consumers

Abstract

Chinese social media heavily influence consumers’ purchasing decisions compared with other countries’ social media use. Furthermore, Chinese millennials purchase products using social media commerce, a fast-growing, online commerce platform in China. This study tried to answer following questions to understand the new platform of online commerce: (a) how do different types of products influence Chinese social media users’ perceptions of social media commerce? (b) Are there gender differences in perceiving risk and convenience of social media commerce? And (c) how do Chinese consumers’ perception affect their trust and willingness to purchase products through social media? This study employed a between-subjects’ online experiment of a fictitious Weibo page to measure Chinese social media users’ perceptions of social media commerce. A total of 149 Chinese university students were recruited from Jiangsu Province, China. The results confirm the importance of product types and gender on consumers’ perceptions of social media commerce and how their perceptions of the convenience of social media commerce strongly influence their purchase intentions in China.

Keywords

• social media commerce
• weibo
• chinese consumer
• online shopping
• gender difference