Exploring factors affecting social e-commerce service adoption: The case of Facebook Gifts

Although social commerce is an important trend in practice, relatively few research studies have explored the impact of social commerce innovations launched within social networking sites. The deployment of a gift-giving service within a social networking site provides a unique opportunity to study the intersection of technological innovations and social norms and its potential to generate new revenue for ecommerce sites. Using Facebook Gifts as a real-world context for the study, we explore the factor structure of salient user beliefs influencing usage intention, and examine the relationships between beliefs and intention to use the service in a broader nomological network. Instead of adopting constructs from existing models, we started with the elicitation of salient beliefs and proceeded with successive stages of refinement to develop a suitable model. The empirical results show countervailing effects of perceived social utility and perceived convenience of the service on one hand, and low perceived value and privacy concerns on the other. A notable finding is the potential conflict arising between the expectations of effort associated with the procurement of a gift and the common perception of technology as reducing the required effort. The net result is that a technology-mediated gift service in the context of a social networking site runs counter to the social norms associated with traditional gift exchanges. This insight provides evidence of the dual challenge for social commerce initiatives. In order to be successful, new services in this area must leverage the potential of the technology as well as social practices.