Effect of Social Presence on Behavioral Intention to Social Commerce Through Online Social Capital

1. Introduction

Internet usage and online purchasing have become a daily part of life and became a major player in sustainable economic development, especially in developing countries (Agarwal and Wu 2018). With the increasing reputation of online shopping and social media, s-commerce has grown to be a promising area of activity for academicians and practitioners. S-commerce is the most essential trait in e-commerce performances that have modified the industrial interactions, the accessibility of information, and the purchasing knowledge (Bugshan et al. 2020; Leung et al. 2019; Hajli and Featherman 2019). The goals of s-commerce are to the use of SNSs to expand the utility of business, as it is tremendous to enlarge various transactions via the exchange of user information. According to current information, the world s-commerce market standard is awaited to increase by 34% rate from 2017 to 2021 and to attain $165.59 billion through 2021 (Wang et al. 2020). Moreover, SNSs have emerged as the best online mission for sharing information and socially interacting with the complete technical ability that supports the development of interactive conversation and has increased efficiency for creating the company's usefulness (Hossain and Kim 2020; Sheikh et al. 2019). Many researchers estimated that the financial decrement of the global GDP could be increased by a 2-4% rate (Pollak and Konecny 2021; Luo and Tsang 2020).

The intention of s-commerce research significantly began from e-commerce (Yuan et al. 2020), and from the perspective of information and knowledge management, behavioral intentions to s-commerce can be referred to as the preferred expectations of visitors in the future (Muslim et al. 2020). In this regard, consumer participation is a vital part of s-commerce sustainability, which has identified social interaction as a considerable component (Yeon et al. 2019). Several types of research have proven that the social presence of digital agents included in e-commerce can have an important effect on consumer confidence, shopping intention, and productivity (Tan et al. 2020; Mimoun et al. 2017). Customers can affect the purchase intentions and purchasing selections of different customers through social interactions, experience sharing and replacing information (Nadeem et al. 2020). Additionally, information-related social capital and social support function are described as social interactions that properly help or experience connecting with an individual or group (Mishra 2020). Social capital consists of the social networks connections with person feelings (Šmaguc and Vuković 2020; Putnam 2000), and these connections strongly inñuence the interpersonal knowledge sharing the intention of s-commerce (Huang et al. 2020). Hossain and Kim (2020) explore a few precious achievements for understanding s-commerce behavior and also highlight the wonderful position of the quality of service dimensions in behavioral perceptions, which throws essential sense on the s-commerce intention and social capital.