Effects of antecedents of collectivism on consumers' intention to use social commerce

Social commerce (s-commerce), a subset of electronic commerce (e-commerce), involves social interactions and user contributions and facilitates the online buying and selling of a wide range products and services. Given that s-commerce encourages consumers to share product- and service-related information, it reflects collectivism, not individualism. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study employs the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method to investigate a research model incorporating consumers' preferences, reliance, concern and norm acceptance as antecedents of collectivism. The results of a survey of 365 s-commerce users indicate that preferences, reliance and norm acceptance had significant effects on the perceived usefulness of s-commerce. In addition, the goodness-of-fit results indicate that collectivism and perceived ease of use accounted for 65.7% of the variance in the perceived usefulness of s-commerce. This study contributed to the literature by providing useful insights into the factors influencing consumers' decision to adopt s-commerce.