You Recommend, I Buy: How and Why People Engage in Instant Messaging Based Social Commerce

Video

DOI

As an emerging business phenomena especially in China, instant messaging (IM) based social commerce is growing increasingly popular, attracting hundreds of millions of users and is becoming one primary way where people make everyday purchase. Such platforms embed shopping experiences within IM apps (e.g. WeChat, WhatsApp), where real world friends post and recommend products from the platform in IM group chats. and quite often form lasting recommending/buying relationship. How and why do users engage on instant messaging based social commerce? Do such platforms create novel shopping experience that is distinct from traditional commerce? And do these platforms bring changes to user social lives and relationship? To shed light on these questions, we launched a qualitative study where we carried out semi-structured interviews on 12 instant messaging based social commerce users in China. We showed that IM based social commerce 1) enables more accessible, cost-reducing and ubiquitous user shopping experience, 2) shape user decision making process in shopping through pre-existing social relationship, mutual trust, shared identity and community norm, and 3) create novel social interactions, which can positvely/negatively influence social relationship. We demonstrate that all these unique aspects of IM based social commerce link closely to the coupling of user social and economic lives on the platform. Our study provides important research and design implications for social commerce design and CSCW applications in general.