The Influence of Actual Social Ties to Trust Individual Online Seller in Social Commerce: A Pilot Study of Participant Observation Method

  • Sabrina Abdul Rahim, Mohd Khairudin Kasiran, Mazida Ahmad

Abstract

Social media popularity has opened up a wide opportunity for individual online seller to increase sales in social commerce. Unfortunately, to trust individual online seller whom usually run the business on his/her own and does not has a well-established firm or brand yet, still a major barrier for consumers to trust and purchase online social commerce. Scholars did a lot of studies on trust in social commerce domain to learn how trust can be increased among consumers. Assessing trust factors from the perspective of consumers was the most strategy taken by previous studies. However, there are still lack of studies that measure trust in social commerce from the perspective of the seller. Therefore, this study is conducted as a pilot study to observe the influence of actual social ties existed between the individual online seller and consumer to trust and purchase in social commerce. A qualitative method of participant observation will be employed in this study. Researcher played a role as a real individual online seller in a natural environment of social commerce specifically, Facebook. Using the wall status updates feature in Facebook, researcher updated daily sales related posting and observed the characteristics and behaviour of the consumers whom purchased from researcher. Findings showed that, all the actual purchasing transactions were made by researcher’s friends whom possess the actual social ties with researcher outside Facebook. These types of actual social ties were explained. In a long run, this strategy is suitable to be used as trust formation mechanism from consumers to individual online sellers and hence, increase the actual purchasing transactions.

 Keywords: trust, social commerce, actual social ties, participant observation method, individual online seller.

Published
2020-06-06
How to Cite
Sabrina Abdul Rahim, Mohd Khairudin Kasiran, Mazida Ahmad. (2020). The Influence of Actual Social Ties to Trust Individual Online Seller in Social Commerce: A Pilot Study of Participant Observation Method. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 29(4s), 2809 - 2815. Retrieved from http://sersc.org/journals/index.php/IJAST/article/view/21064