The Factors Influencing Continuance Intention and Herd Behaviour in Social Commerce: Ease of Use and Online Customer Experience

Social commerce is proliferating worldwide, but it has only attracted scant academic attention on what psychological factors influence consumer decision-making. Guided by the stimulus-organism-response (S–O–R) framework, we examined the influences from ease of use and online customer experience (OCE) on consumers’ continuance intention and herd behaviour in China’s two prominent social commerce formats: live streaming commerce and group buying. An online structured questionnaire was distributed among the social commerce consumers, and 694 valid respondents were collected. To evaluate the proposed conceptual model, we employed the statistical analysis approach of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), specifically, SPSS 28.0 and SmartPLS 4.0. This empirical study yields some significant results. First, OCE contributes significantly to continuance intention, followed by herd behaviour. Second, ease of use directly influences continuance intention and OCE but not herd behaviour. OCE plays a mediation role in transferring the effect of ease of use to herd behaviour. Third, we found OCE, one of the uncontrollable factors in social commerce, is critical within the consumer decision-making process. In contrast, ease of use plays a less significant contribution role as a controllable factor. The results of this study provide managerial implications to the social commerce adopters, who are targeting consumers with Chinese backgrounds around the world. The limitations and suggestions for future research are also discussed.