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Social media technologies (SMTs) have transcended the social networking arena to become more socioeconomic tools (Lee, 2015) that many individuals use to conduct online business. SMT is becoming a selling channel for startups, microbusinesses, and private businesses (Ghezzi, Gastaldi, Lettieri, Martini, & Corso, 2016). Penni (2017) calls this phenomenon an explosion, as unlike e-commerce, SMT facilitates social collaboration and interaction through joining groups and building relationships.
With the increasing number of SMT users estimated to be around 4.48 billion (Dean, 2022), the trend now is to use SMTs for social commerce, also called s-commerce (Rouibah, Al-Qirim, Hwang, & Pouri, 2021), instead of social use (Al-Rawi, Al-Musalli, & Fakida, 2021; Rouibah, 2008; Sheldon, Rauschnabel, Antony, & Car, 2017). As a selling channel, s-commerce provides ample opportunities for businesses in general and microbusinesses specifically, adding important surrogates to traditional online selling avenues like e-commerce websites. The global s-commerce market is growing from $449.36 billion in 2020 to $501.04 billion in 2021, with an annual growth rate of 11.5%. The market will reach $792.69 billion in 2025 at a 12.2% annual growth rate (Markets, 2022). Accordingly, these figures are core indicators for future investments and commerce. According to Petrova and Datta (2022), the customer is considered a co-creator of information and an active participant in service exchanges.
There are several definitions of s-commerce (Lin, Li, & Wang, 2017; Mou & Benyoucef, 2021).
Following Rouibah et al. (2021) we define s-commerce as “the exchange-related activities that can be influenced by an individual’s SMTs in computer-mediated social environments – where the activities correspond to need recognition, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.” There are several tools for s-commerce, such as Instagram, which is the focus of this study (Rouibah et al., 2021). Compared to e-commerce websites, s-commerce tools differ in terms of functionality and features. They allow users to communicate, interact, edit, and share content through activities such as likes and dislikes that reach a huge number of potential users with minimal costs (Penni, 2017). These functions ease end-users’ activities, and hence, s-commerce contributes to lowering IT investment costs for entrepreneurs and microbusinesses. S-commerce comprises many facets that can be transactional (buying) and/or relational (electronic word of mouth) as well as social referral incentives, promotions, advertising, co-creation, user-generated contents, and information sharing. Therefore, the s-commerce unique attributes stem from the interactivity, collaboration, community, and social aspects.
Since few studies focus on the adoption of Instagram for Micro-Businesses (noted here as IMB) for s-commerce purposes, this study aims to answer the following research question: What important factors drive or inhibit microbusinesses from successfully adopting Instagram-based s-commerce in a developing country?