Investigating the moderating effect of social identity on group buying purchase intention

This research studied the user behavior on online group buying services. In the research model, users’ behavior is represented by three dimensions, satisfactory, trust, and group buying intention. Satisfaction is hypothesized to have positive relationship with trust that will have positive impact on the purchase intention. Each of the three dimensions is divided into two constructs, one for product and the other one for the web site. Satisfaction is divided into two dimensions, satisfaction toward the products and satisfaction toward the web service. Similarly, trust toward the product and trust toward the web site are the two constructs for trust. Lastly, the intention to purchase the product traded in any web site and the intention to purchase any product on the web site are the two constructs for purchase intentions. In addition, the moderating effect of social identity on the relationship between trust and purchase intention was tested. A marketing firm was hired to conduct the survey and 300 effective samples were collected. The results show that all of the causal relationships were all significant while the moderating effects of social identity were significant on two of the three relationships. Furthermore, managerial implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.