A Systematic Review of Social Commerce Adoption by Customers

Social commerce as a new paradigm of commerce has been considered for about a decade. The first attempt to apply this paradigm is to examine its acceptance process. In this research, social commerce acceptance studies have been reviewed with primary and secondary search strategies. The main purpose of this research is to examine the acceptance process from different perspectives and to analyze the research gap that paves the way for future research in this field. Survey perspectives include focus on acceptance steps, basic theories used, focus on value creation, extent of customer engagement, focus on innovation, type of media used, geographical focus, type of business transactions concerned, their influential factors, thematic focus and applied focus area, research methods used, data analysis tools and statistical samples. Accordingly, 203 articles were reviewed with two approaches: quantitative analysis and gap analysis. Quantitative analysis of studies showed that acceptance technology as the highest theories, social networks as most platforms, trust as the most widely used factor, Asia as most continental geographical focus, China and the United States as the most geographical focus of the country. Based on the gap analysis, service-oriented businesses, qualitative methods and modeling, focusing on e-commerce platforms and equipping them with social commerce constructs, and focusing on business-to-business transactions were identified as research gaps.