Antecedents and consequences of trust in online product recommendations

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to improve understanding of the reasons why people trust the information about product recommendations on social shopping networks of websites, a new e‐commerce method which combines social networking and shopping, and to investigate the impact of the trust on the consumers' intention to purchase products from the online shop of a website.Design/methodology/approachAn online survey instrument was developed to gather data, and 1,219 questionnaires were used to test the relationships in the proposed model.FindingsThe results indicated that perceived ability, perceived benevolence/integrity, perceived critical mass, and trust in a website were four important antecedents of trust in product recommendation in a social networking site. In addition trust in product recommendations can influence the consumers' intention to purchase from the website through increasing their intention to purchase the products.Research limitations/implicationsThe research model demonstrated the importance of trust in product recommendations to online consumers' transaction intention.Practical implicationsThe results of the study showed that trust in product recommendations will influence consumers' purchase intentions. Therefore a social shopping website or the websites transforming into social shopping websites should put more emphasis on ways to establish the virtual communities or social networks which can provide the information about product recommendations that consumers trust.Originality/valueThe study provides a comprehensive framework of the antecedents and effects of consumers' trust in recommendations in the context of social shopping.

How social shopping retains customers? Capturing the essence of website quality and relationship quality

“…The market potential of social shopping is increased by social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, and MySpace that help merchants to quickly get a large pool of potential customers and various product or merchant reputation sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor (Lee & Lee, 2012). Social shopping sites such as Kaboodle, ThisNext, Crowdstorm, Stylehive, Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan, LuxJoy, WooGii and Pinkoi, provide blogs or virtual communities for consumers to share shopping thoughts, exchange opinions on specific merchandises and recommend their favorites (Hsiao et al, 2010). Therefore, influencing potential consumers through information sharing and interactions of the provided blogs or virtual communities is a significant benefit of social shopping sites.…”

“…Hence, future research may explore the impacts of these factors on consumers' willingness to purchase from the social shopping. Additionally, the types of product may affect consumers' online purchase intentions (Hsiao et al, 2010), so this affect also can be tested in the social shopping context. Fourthly, we know that the service failure is inevitable in a web-based service industry, and consumers are easy to publicly express their opinions, experiences 30 and complaints after a service failure.…”

“…Stylehive permits users to bookmark their desired products, enhance pictures, and share them with concurring shoppers, family, and friends. Users enable Stylehive to also create personal wish-lists, which can also be classified and shared with family and friends (Hsiao et al, 2010).…”

“…Kaboodle, ThisNext, Wanelo, Crowdstorm, Stylehive, Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan, LuxJoy, WooGii and Pinkoi are some of the examples of social shopping sites, tender virtual communities or blogs for consumers to share shopping thoughts, exchange opinions on specific merchants and recommend their favorites (Hsiao, Lin, Wang, Lu, & Yu, 2010). These thoughts, opinions or recommendations are helpful for consumers getting product information of interest and supporting them in making shopping decisions.…”

Online drivers and offline influences related to loyalty to airline websites

“…Another antecedent of e-loyalty is e-trust, which we define as a consumer's propensity to trust a website (Hsiao et al, 2010). E-trust has gained interest in the field of electronic commerce, being dealt with in several studies (Chen 2006) and the online literature has tested the antecedent relationship between e-satisfaction and e-trust (Anderson and Srinivasan, 2003).…”