From Blogosphere to Social Commerce: A Laddering Analysis of Sellers' Motivation

Abstract

Although the field of social commerce has gained a lot of attention recently, there are many areas that still remain unexplored. One of these gaps is the growing use of social commerce by micro businesses. This paper explores the factors that motivate members of a virtual community to venture into business-related activities (i.e. selling goods and services to other community members and/or writing product reviews). Laddering and observation were used to collect data from 21 members in order to investigate this phenomenon. We found that as well as the motivation to increase profits and ensure business sustainability, members were also driven by a sense of virtual community. From the sellers' perspective, their participation in the virtual community has a significant impact on their business in terms of the support they receive from members, in addition to the obvious business advantages of using social media such as convenience and cost effectiveness.