Electronic commerce : Consumers’ perception of mobile social commerce in Sweden

Abstract: The evolution of mobile telephony and social media platforms gave birth to different new concepts of electronic commerce (e-commerce), such as mobile commerce (m-commerce) and social commerce (s-commerce). In 2014 a new concept called mobile social commerce (mscommerce) was introduced. This concept occurs when e-commerce activities are performed on social media platforms using mobile devices. Many researchers did look into e-commerce and its different concepts, but not so many did look into ms-commerce, especially when it comes to exploring the consumers’ perception of this concept and their shopping motivation. The aim of this study is to explore the relation between ms-commerce and the Swedish consumers in order to find out what is the consumers’ perception of ms-commerce in Sweden, and how ms-commerce affects consumers’ shopping motivation. To do this a qualitative approach is used where interviews with 9 people using ms-commerce platforms to buy products were conducted. The research is based on the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model (UTAUT2). The findings of this study indicate that consumers perceive ms-commerce in Sweden as a very useful and entertaining technology that has economic benefits for the consumers, but they also perceive it to have privacy issues and to be lacking trustworthiness. Furthermore, the findings strongly suggest that ms-commerce comments on products available on ms-commerce platforms have a direct influence on consumers’ shopping motivation, the live chat feature available on ms-commerce platforms is a very good tool that has a positive influence on consumers shopping motivation, and targeted advertisement in ms-commerce has no influence on consumers’ shopping motivation.