Published Online:February 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Marketing Management
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJMM050225
DOI:10.71329/IUPJMM/2025.24.1.90-115
Author Name:Kaajal Sharma and Tejinderpal Singh
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:90-115
The study seeks to explore how website social interactions influence consumers’ purchase intentions, with a particular emphasis on exploring the influence of trusting beliefs on this relationship. It examines the significance of social commerce in online platform by presenting website social presence as an independent variable, in line with Social Presence Theory (SPT). For this purpose, both mediation and moderation analyses were performed. The research model was analyzed using positivist paradigm with data collected via a questionnaire on the study’s constructs. Utilizing survey data gathered from 263 respondents, the results from Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4 showed strong support for all the proposed hypotheses. The results reveal that website social presence has a significant positive association with purchase intention, with trusting beliefs serving as a full mediator and partial moderator in this association.
The absence of personal and social factors in the digital world is a major noteworthy disparity between offline and online platforms, which is impeding the escalation of electronic commerce (Cyr et al., 2009; and Hassanein et al., 2009). It is often described as its biggest limitation (Pavlou and Gefen, 2004).