International Journal of Information Management 35 (2015) 538–550 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Information Management journal h om epa ge : www.elsevier.com/l ocate/ijinfomgt Effect of social commerce factors on user purchase behavior: An empirical investigation from renren.com Yan Bai 1 , Zhong Yao ∗ , Yi-Fan Dou 2 School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 27 June 2014 Received in revised form 17 March 2015 Accepted 28 April 2015 Keywords: Social commerce Consumer purchasing intentions Social support Seller uncertainty Product uncertainty Third-party infomediaries a b s t r a c t As a new type of e-commerce, social commerce is an emerging marketing form in which business is conducted via social networking platforms. It is playing an increasingly important role in influencing consumers’ purchase intentions. Social commerce uses friendships on social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as the vehicle for social sharing about products or sellers to induce interest in a product, thereby increasing the purchase intention. In this paper, we develop and validate a conceptual model of how social factors, such as social support, seller uncertainty, and product uncertainty, influence users’ purchasing behaviors in social commerce. This study aims to provide an understanding of the relationship between user behavior and social factors on social networking platforms. Using the largest social networking website in China, renren.com, this study finds that social support, seller uncertainty, and product uncertainty affect user behaviors. The results further show that social factors can significantly enhance users’ purchase intentions in social shopping. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Following the rapid development of Web 2.0, online shop- ping has become an important part of modern life (Fagerstrøm and Ghinea, 2010). When consumers shop on e-commerce plat- forms, such as Amazon, eBay, and Taobao, they often comment on products and/or services after consumption, which helps other consumers collect product information. Nevertheless, it is some- times difficult for consumers to trust the reviews on shopping platforms because merchants may provide mendacious informa- tion, e.g., inaccurate descriptions or sham comments (Kim and Song, 2005). Fortunately, this constraint may be alleviated using social network shopping platforms, as users in social networks are friends or indirect acquaintances. They share and communicate their purchasing and consumption experiences to obtain relatively real and accurate product information. Business activities conducted through social media are called social commerce (SC) or social shopping (Liang, Ho, & Li, 2012). Social commerce is a new expansion of e-commerce (Stephen and ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 10 82317802; fax: +86 10 82318037. E-mail addresses: xiaoyoulang@163.com (Y. Bai), iszhyao@buaa.edu.cn (Z. Yao), Duo@buaa.edu.cn (Y.-F. Dou). 1 Tel.: +86 15210959697; fax: +86 10 82318037. 2 Tel.: +86 13810667204; fax: +86 10 82318037. Toubia, 2010). Some empirical studies have compared relation- ships in social commerce and e-commerce (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). In contrast, to date, there has been little research attention paid to the phenomenon of purchase intention in social commerce with new social features, such as social media and social business behaviors. Because of the lack of knowledge of these emerging commerce technologies in social media, it may be presumptu- ous to apply previous findings concerning e-commerce to social commerce. Therefore, additional research efforts are needed to ana- lyze and evaluate social commerce theoretically and empirically to advance our understanding of this important and expanding form of e-commerce. To address this deficiency, the present study investigates the design of a social commerce survey by identifying its two primary feature types, namely social features and commerce features. More specifically, social features usually include a social networking platform, users, and user-generated content (UGC) (Liang and Turban, 2011). Commerce features refer to product factors and the certification/guarantee of product/services by third-party organizations (Dimoka, Hong, & Pavlou, 2012). These two features are related to the two fundamental processes of social commerce. In terms of social features, UGC not only reflects the interaction among users but also aggregates critical information as a result of users sharing product information through the social networking platform. Moreover, the factors of products in business activity features represent the attributes of the product and sellers, i.e., the http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.04.011 0268-4012/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.