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How website socialness leads to website use

  • Original Article
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Website designers are beginning to incorporate social cues, such as helpfulness and familiarity, into e-commerce sites to facilitate the exchange relationship. Website socialness elicits a social response from users of the site and this response produces enjoyment. Users patronize websites that are exciting, entertaining and stimulating. The purpose of our study is to explore the effects of website socialness perceptions on the formation of users’ beliefs, attitudes and subsequent behavioral intentions. We manipulate website socialness perceptions across two different online shopping contexts, one for functional products and the other for pleasure-oriented products, and draw from the responses of 300 Internet users. Our findings show that website socialness perceptions lead to enjoyment, have a strong influence on user intentions and these effects are invariant across shopping contexts.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the senior editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and guidance throughout the revision process. We also thank the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University for their support of this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Baylor University, Waco, U.S.A.

    Robin L Wakefield & Kirk L Wakefield

  2. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, U.S.A.

    Julie Baker

  3. University of Dallas, Irving, U.S.A.

    Liz C Wang

Authors
  1. Robin L Wakefield
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  2. Kirk L Wakefield
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  3. Julie Baker
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  4. Liz C Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robin L Wakefield.

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table A1.

Table A1 Respondent instructions
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Appendix B

See Table B1.

Table B1 Measurement items and loadings
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Wakefield, R., Wakefield, K., Baker, J. et al. How website socialness leads to website use. Eur J Inf Syst 20, 118–132 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2010.47

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