Title: Impacts of social media usage on consumers' engagement in social commerce: the roles of trust and cultural distance

Authors: Shangui Hu; Tao Huang; Feifei Hu; Lingyu Hu

Addresses: College of Business Administration, Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China ' College of Business Administration, Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China ' Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China ' Department of Logistics and E-Commerce College, Zhejiang Wanli University, Ningbo, China

Abstract: The prevalence of social media transforms e-business into social commerce and facilitates consumers' engagement in cross-cultural social commerce. However, social commerce operations encounter unpredictable challenges in cross-cultural business environment. It is vital to further investigate how contextual elements affect consumers' trust and their engagement when they are exposed to the complexity of cross-cultural business environment. The stimuli-organism-response paradigm is employed to examine how the two dimensions of social media usage influence consumers' engagement in cross-cultural social commerce. The current study surveyed 2,058 samples from 135 countries, and the regression analysis results illustrate the mechanism whereby informational and socialising usage of social media positively influences consumers' engagement in social commerce through consumers' trust toward social commerce websites. Additionally, the associations between two aspects of social media usage and consumers' trust towards social commerce are negatively moderated by cultural distance. Both theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Keywords: social commerce; trust; engagement; cultural distance; social media usage; SMU.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2024.141876

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2024 Vol.24 No.4, pp.401 - 423

Received: 06 Oct 2022
Accepted: 05 Mar 2023
Published online: 02 Oct 2024 *

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