Exploring Chinese Users’ Acceptance of Social Commerce Sites

With its rapid economic growth and the largest number of Internet users worldwide, China and its vast online markets are of particular interests to companies globally. This paper describes a study of Chinese users’ acceptance of an emerging Ecommerce technology: social commerce websites. Leveraging the power of social networking technologies with online shopping, social commerce sites have emerged in recent years to address the fundamental nature of shopping as a social experience. Despite tremendous business interest and anticipated potential benefits, some central issues remain such as whether Chinese Internet users will adopt such websites and the factors that affect the adoption. This study extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with social factors such as social comparison, social presence, and enjoyment in the acceptance of social commerce websites. Results provide significant support of the extended model.