Abstract
Social commerce is a new development in e-commerce generated by the use of social media (or social network) to help users participate in the marketing and buying in online. Recent research efforts on social commerce focus on two perspectives: firm- side and consumer-side. Prior work has demonstrated that purchase decisions of consumers are often influenced by friends on social commerce. But nobody investigates whether social relationship does the same thing in the traditional e-commerce that incorporates social functions. Yelp.com is such an example that embeds rich social functions in its website. This study conducts an empirical analysis on the Yelp dataset and seek to investigate the impacts of social relationship from the consumer-side. We combine statistical analysis and social network analysis to gain insights into social commerce in Yelp.com. We obtain some interesting findings. Consequently, a conclusion is drawn, i.e., the social commerce only works among a small part of users in Yelp.com from a perspective of the consumer-side.
Recommended Citation
Qiu, Jiangtao; Li, Yinghong; and Lin, Zhangxi, "Does Social Commerce Work in Yelp? An Empirical Analysis of Impacts of Social Relationship on the Purchase Decision-making" (2018). PACIS 2018 Proceedings. 16.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2018/16