A study on factors affecting Thai consumers’ purchase decision in social commerce

Citation

Hongya, Chen. (2018). A study on factors affecting Thai consumers’ purchase decision in social commerce. (Independent study, Master of Business Administration). Bangkok: Siam University.

Abstract

Since China and Thailand established diplomatic relations, especially the signing of the Agreement on Free Trade Area between China and Thailand in recent years and the implementation of China’s “The Belt and Road” strategy, the bilateral trade relations between China and Thailand have been continuously close and the volume of trade has been increasing. Currently, the investment of Chinese enterprises in Thailand has been growing rapidly, and the scale has also been expanding. At present, China has become Thailand’s third largest exporter and the second largest source of imports. In the good situation of bilateral trade development, how to enter the Thai market and how to increase the trade volume of Chinese enterprises have become the urgent problems to be solved by small and medium-sized enterprises in China. The traditional way of entering the Thai market has become more and more difficult to adapt to Thailand’s social and economic development. The rapid development of social media and e-commerce provides new possibilities for small and medium-sized enterprises to enter the Thai market. This article studied the social commerce in Thailand, explored its impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions, in order to provide a reference for the Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises to enter the Thai market.

This research synthesized a large number of documents, defined the concept and connotation of social commerce, and analyzed that it had obvious social interaction attribute. Because the existing literature mainly uses the technology acceptance model (TAM) to study the acceptable degree of the social commerce website, the socialization attribute is not taken into account. Therefore, this study analyzed the factors that affect the purchase decision of social commerce users and built the model with the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. The hypothesis of the significant relationship between social interaction, perceived risk, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, perceived trust, and purchase decision-making was proposed. The relationship between social interaction, perceived risk, performance expectation, effort expectation, perceived trust, and purchase decision-making was analyzed through empirical analysis.

According to the literature, a research model including social interaction, perceived risk, performance expectations, effort expectations, perceived trust, and purchase decision-making was constructed. Through the design of variables-related measurement scales, a questionnaire survey was carried out. A total of 237 valid samples were collected. The reliability and validity of the collected data were analyzed by SPSS software, and the fitting verification of the research model was carried out by using Amos software. The results showed that the constructed research model had a good fitting degree. The coefficient of path analysis shows that social interaction, perceived risk, performance expectation, effort expectation, and perceived trust have a significant impact on purchase decision-making, and perceived trust plays a mediating role.

Among all the variables that affect user purchase decision, perceived risk is the biggest, performance expectation is the second, social interaction is the third, effort expectation is the fourth, and perceived trust is the last. Finally, this study has the limitations of sample selection, in the future, we can expand the scope of samples to further improve the relevant research.

Keywords:  Social commerce, Purchase decision, Social interaction, Perceived risk.

A study on factors affecting Thai consumers’ purchase decision in social commerce

International Master in Business Administration (IMBA), Siam University, Bangkok, Thailand