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Top1. Introduction
Rapid advances in technology and the exponential growth in the number of social network users notably on Facebook and Instagram, have led companies to show growing interest in online channels as a means for engaging, entertaining, and informing consumers. More recently, social networks have evolved to offer companies spaces through which they can sell their products, this has become known as social commerce (Hajli, 2015). Social commerce makes use of Web 2.0 applications to help consumers and companies interact within an online context thus allowing users to acquire products and services (Liang & Turban, 2011). Social commerce is frequently identified as a form of e-commerce activity (Liang & Turban, 2011), and has quickly become one of the key areas of interest among scholars in the online marketing research area (Roy et al., 2017). In the past few years, however, numerous differences have been depicted between social commerce and traditional e-commerce (Fu et al., 2019). This justifies the need for further studies in the field as social commerce is still considered to be a promising area of research (Esmaeili & Hashemi, 2019).
Traditionally, consumers have used shopping as a mean of acquiring what they need or a mean to stimulate positive emotions such as enjoyment (Chung et al., 2017). According to Babin et al., (1994), these two main types of motivations are known as: utilitarian and hedonic. In the context of e-commerce, hedonic and utilitarian motivations have been previously used to identify the factors affecting online consumers’ purchasing decisions (Yang et al., 2016; Mikalef et al., 2013; To et al., 2007). For instance, Song et al., 2015, found that currently consumers have the tendency to put higher value on an experimental and hedonic style of consumption such as impulsive buying. While Kim & Oh (2011) concluded that users are likely to prefer utilitarian shopping value to the hedonic shopping one as it offers customer satisfaction and trust (Chung et al., 2017). Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate shopping motivations in the online context, however very few have explored the utilitarian perspective of shopping motivation within the social commerce context (Kumar & Kashyap, 2018). Additionally, with the emergence of new technologies, it has become more challenging to engage consumers in social commerce by relying solely on the utilitarian motive. In fact, the use of social networks has helped in creating a new and enjoyable purchase experience which led researchers to focus on the hedonic motive (Aydın, 2019). The importance of the hedonic motive in the online environment has also been well demonstrated in several studies in developed and emerging countries (Chiu et al. 2014; To, Liao, and Lin 2007). Hence, the importance of studying both the utilitarian and hedonic motives when analyzing consumers’ purchase intention within social commerce.