Social purchasing and the influence of social networking: a conceptual view

Internet has enabled businesses to offer their merchandise through web-based applications, of which recent phenomenon includes online social networks (OSNs). This paper studies the influence of OSNs through the lens of perceived trust (PT), social norm (SN), user satisfaction (US) and perceived behavioral control (PBC) to find out how these influence participants of OSNs continuance buying intention. A model of IS continuance intention of web-based application was developed to test the above factors. The results show that trust in OSN is based mainly on the degree of the social relations that users have with their vendors, because they are members on the network, on top of their experiences of web service use. US was influenced by PBC, while US also influenced SN and PT with PT exhibiting a strong relationship with SN.

Keywords: continuance intention, OSN, participants, purchasing.
JEL Classification: Z13, G21, M10, M31, D11, D12