Abstract:

Users being able to transit between social context and consumption context is a critical feature of social commerce. However, these transitions have been largely overlooked in the current research on social commerce adoption. In order to fill this research gap, a new concept called social-to-consumption transition which refers to transitions from social context to consumption context in social commerce networks or communities is proposed. Based on the boundary theory to explore antecedents and promotion mechanism of social-to-consumption transition will contribute to a broader and more comprehensive understanding of social commerce adoption, facilitate theory development in research on social commerce, and have important practical implications for promoting social-to-consumption transition. Specifically, there are four aspects of contents to explore: (1) the connotation and extension of social-to-consumption transition; (2) the potential influence of community integration supplies on consumers’ integrated social boundary creation and social-to-consumption transition; (3) the potential influence of boundary segmentation preference on integrated social boundary creation and social-to-consumption transition; (4) the moderating effect of community boundary customized climate on the relationship between integrated social boundary creation and social-to-consumption transition.

Key words: social commerce adoption, social-to-consumption transition, community integration supplies, users’ boundary segmentation preference;, community boundary customized climate