The effect of actual social ties to the actual buying in social commerce

• Main Authors: Abdul Rahim, Sabrina, Kasiran, Mohd Khairudin, Ahmad, Mazida
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/23557/1/ICT4T2016%20293%20297.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/23557/

Popularity of the social media usage has opened a wide opportunity to the online sellers to expand their social commerce revenue.Unfortunately, this potential can’t be fully utilized by most of them especially by the individual online sellers whom are usually running the business individually and not owning a well-known and established firms. Most of these individual online sellers are facing to the ongoing debated issue by the scholars; the issue to get a customers’ trustworthy to buy their merchandise.All this while, the issue of a consumer trust has been a huge barrier to the online business. Hence, this study is conducted to observe the effect of the actual social ties to the actual buying in social commerce by beginning the online sales with the customers whom possessed the actual social ties with the online seller outside the social media.Using a full participatory observation approach in a real social commerce environment, the researcher put herself as a real individual online seller. Using social networking site Facebook, the researcher posted the sales posting through the status updates function and tagged her Facebook friend list whom has the actual social ties with her outside the Facebook.Findings showed that, these kind of friends’ relationship have a bright potential to expand the researcher’s business based on their trustworthy to the researcher in the first place.In a long run, this strategy is seen to be able to act as the mechanism for trust formation towards the individual online sellers hence, increase the actual sales’ transactions.