Value and Sustainability of Emerging Social Commerce Professions: An Exploratory Study

Date
2022-03-31
Authors
Petrova, K
Datta, S
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract

Recent advances in social commerce and mobile technology have led to the emergence of new professions such as vlogging, blogging and virtual pop-up store owning. Starting initially as hobbies, the services provided by these ‘new professionals’ have become ubiquitous and are being used by customers from many different countries and backgrounds. This paper reports on a study that first explored the views and opinions of new professionals from several fields (using a qualitative approach), and then the views of their potential customers (a quantitative study informed by UTAUT2—the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology). The results indicated that new professionals both create and co-create value with their customers, peers, and some existing, traditionally established professions. The results also indicated that the intended audience/customers of the new professional businesses had a positive perception of their long-term commercial sustainability. Customers’ intention to use the new professional services in the future were predicted mostly by the behavioral characteristics of hedonic motivation and habit. The research contributes by empirically investigating the value creation and co-creation processes in a context that is yet to attract academic interest. It proposes a value creation and co-creation framework that draws on the interactions of the main players.

Description
Keywords
Blogging; Vlogging; Pop-up store; sCommerce; mCommerce; Social media; UTAUT2; Content analysis; Customer survey; Value co-creation
Source
Information, 13(4), 178. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13040178
Rights statement
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/license s/by/4.0/).