Assessing the Influence Mechanism of Media Richness on Customer Experience, Trust and Swift Guanxi in Social Commerce

In contrast to traditional e-commerce, social commerce features deliver seller offerings and user-generated content (UGC) to facilitate consumer interactions. Social commerce sellers convey this abundant information using various media types, including livestreams, short videos, and social media channels. However, there is a lack of research on the influence of rich media content on consumers’ attitudes and relationships with the seller. This empirical study focuses on live streaming commerce and group buying for fashion products in mainland China, where both social commerce formats are growing fast. Drawing on media richness theory, we propose a conceptual framework to quantify the influence mechanisms of media richness. Our framework encompasses three sets of hypotheses. First, it was proposed that media richness directly contributes to swift guanxi (“guanxi” in Chinese means relationship), customer experience, and trust. Second, to understand how the consumer responds to media richness, we hypothesized that customer experience directly influences swift guanxi and trust. The final hypothesis evaluates whether live streaming commerce, with its rich content akin to face-to-face communication, can positively moderate these established causal connections. Based on an analysis using partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with 694 valid respondents, we found that media richness directly influences swift guanxi and customer experience, but does not directly influence trust. Furthermore, customer experience dominates in transferring the influence of media richness to swift guanxi. Additionally, media richness positively affects trust only by enhancing customer experience. Unexpectedly, live streaming commerce cannot magnify the influence of media richness on the examined psychological factors. This result has managerial implications: live streaming commerce has no advantage over group buying based on its richer media content in forming a more harmonious and trusting relationship with social commerce sellers. Social commerce adopters should focus on the quality and efficiency of media content, rather than information quantity, to facilitate a satisfying consumer experience. We also discuss this study’s limitations and offer suggestions for future research.