The development of media have generated new marketing channels until the present. The first marketing channel was face-to-face. And then, mail marketing channel such as catalog sales was derived from the development of mail system and, the invention o...
The development of media have generated new marketing channels until the present. The first marketing channel was face-to-face. And then, mail marketing channel such as catalog sales was derived from the development of mail system and, the invention of telephone made another marketing channel through telephone line. DELL, which is an American computer manufacturing company, is an example of using telephone as a marketing channel. From late 1990s, Internet has rapidly advanced and got into our lives and, it made a powerful marketing channel. E-commerce, which is using Internet to purchase products and pay the cost, emerged and has organized, and it attracts many people and makes them participate in the channel. The Internet has evolved more and more. Moreover, it has played a role of a bridge among people and as a result, social commmerce which is a new marketing channel has been generated .
The basic concept of social commerce was told in early 2000s, but social commerce has been popular and made a issue nowaday because of many successful result of using social commerce. Many people are trying to analyze the new channel and attempt to establish a effective marketing plan. One of the examples is socialcommercetoday.com which is an online community for understanding social commerce and discussing the way to improve it. Tendencies like that has shown in many companies, but it is hard to see in academic researches.
In that reason, the aim of this research is to study social commerce through attitude-behavior(intention)-WOM(intention) construct and to provide implications for practical field and academic field. In this research, we investigate the factors which effect the consumers' attitude on social commerce, and then find out the influence of the attitude on intention to use and intention to WOM. We take six factors - trust, utility, fun, price, referral, risk - from some conceptual white papers because there isn't antecedent reseach about social commerce attitude. There are three types of social commerce those are Group purchasing, Connecting with existing web pages, and Opening a store in SNS. Among them, we conduct this study with Group purchasing which is well known and the most popular type in Korea.
We can see some significant results through this study. First of all, the six factors generate consumers' attitude on social commerce. It means that managers had better to consider many things than only price.
Second, the generated attitude effects the intention to use social commerce for searching information, and finally affect the intention to use social commerce for purchasing goods. In sum, the intention to use social commerce for searching information has a key mediating role to the intention to use social commerce for purchasing goods.
Finally, social commerce attitude and the intention to use social commerce for searching information influence word-of-mouth. In other words, managers may manage positive WOM by concerning over social commerce attitude and the intention to use social commerce for searching information.