Studying the Affecting Factors on Trust in Social Commerce

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing literature to identify key factors influencing trust in social commerce, highlighting the importance of trust for virtual transactions and summarizing 19 factors affecting trust.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes and synthesizes literature to identify and categorize factors affecting trust in social commerce, providing a comprehensive overview.

Findings

Identified 19 factors influencing trust in social commerce.

Firm size, trust disposition, information quality, and familiarity are most cited.

Highlights the need for further research on trust in virtual social commerce.

Abstract

Recently, e-commerce has enjoyed the appearance of many novel opportunities created as a result of the increasing growth of social networks. Social commerce (s-commerce), an offspring of e-commerce, interconnects users and helps with the commerce process facilitated by social networks as well as other media. Uncertainty and trust are always an issue in any type of commerce and especially in s-commerce where, due to its nature, a higher level of risk and uncertainty exists. Despite the history for trust in virtual commercial transactions, there are a limited number of researches on the topic; and the current shift towards commerce in virtual communities and networks begs further attention. Therefore, in this paper, by scrutinizing the available literature on the topic, the affecting factors on trust in scommerce are identified and introduced. Among the reviewed papers, 7 papers matched the criteria, and overall, 19 factors were extracted. Firm size, trust disposition, information quality, and familiarity with other members were among the most cited factors in the literature.