| Summary: | Social commerce – “social media + e-commerce” – is a new market place for both consumers and marketers. Also considering the consumers’ uncertainty brought by intangible service domain, therefore, this paper explores the relationship between social commerce information sharing and hotel booking intention. This study uses Mehrabian and Russell’s “Stimulus- Organism-Response” (SOR) model and hotel brand loyalty building, hedonic value, trust transfer, herding behaviour are chosen to be “Organisms” in this framework to investigate the moderating effect. It carries out an analysis of primary data obtained from users of a Chinese social commerce site operating in the field of hotel booking (Mafengwo, similar to TripAdvisor) and it uses that analysis to draw practical conclusions and advices.
The result of this study shows that in social commerce, information sharing has direct and indirect – via “Organisms” – influences on hotel booking intention. In specific, information sharing positively influences both four “Organisms” and hotel booking intention; however, only hedonic value and trust transfer positively influence booking intention and consumers’ hotel brand loyalty building shows non-significantly negative impact on booking. So Chinese hotels, social commerce sites managers both could improve strategy on hedonic design and information control. Although this study has examined the commercial potential of social commerce, it could be found that Mafengwo is not mature enough, thus it should be pay more attention on developing the consumption section to improve competitive advantages.
Keywords: social commerce, SOR framework, information sharing, hotel booking intention, Mafengwo
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