Consumers always look around for information before making a purchase decision. The word-of-mouth is a voluntary source of information that plays an important role in consumer's decision making process. Social commerce, which has emerged with the tren...
Consumers always look around for information before making a purchase decision. The word-of-mouth is a voluntary source of information that plays an important role in consumer's decision making process. Social commerce, which has emerged with the trend of SNS, can be seen as a new form of marketing that is well utilizing oral activities among consumers. Existing studies related to social commerce have mainly been conducted on the impact of co-purchasing and there is a lack of exploration on other types of social commerce. In addition, social commerce has grown based on oral influences, but existing studies lack of research on the effects of oral information. Especially in the Web2.0 era, which emphasizes the user's activeness, the characteristics of users can also affect the word-of-mouth effect so much that it can not be overlooked.
Therefore, this study selected the experience-based social commerce app, Xiaohongshu, which is gaining considerable popularity in China these days, and approached from the process of information exploration in social commerce to find out how oral information characteristics (consensus, vividness, neutrality, expertise, homophily) and information literacy affect information acceptance and re-WOM intention. This study conducted a survey of people who had used Xiaohongshu to find oral information in one year, and a total of 366 valid questionnaires were retrieved and analyzed through SPSS 23.0. The main findings are as follows.
First, the analysis results showed that the WOM information characteristics of social commerce had the positive effect on the information acceptance in proportion to the neutrality of WOM information and the perceptual sender's expertise and homophily. Second, the consensus of online WOM information and the perceptual sender's expertise and homophily showed a significant positive effect on re-WOM intention. In addition, the information acceptance was found to have a largest positive effect on the re-WOM intention. Third, the moderating effect of information literacy was revealed only on the relationship between perceived information provider expertise and information acceptance, and between the consensus of online WOM information and re-WOM intention. Groups with low information literacy were more affected by the perceived expertise in accepting WOM information than those with high information, and were more affected by the consensus of online WOM information in re-WOM intention.
This study revealed a direct relationship between online WOM characteristics of social commerce and the acceptance of information and re-WOM intention. In addition, this study examined the moderating effect of user information literacy, which was hardly covered in previous studies on the effect of online WOM.