2.1. Social Commerce
While the B2C market is growing and profitable, the competition for market share is also increasing in many retail sectors (e.g., books, travel, information, music, insurance, and electronics). Social commerce has a significant impact on the social interaction between business processes and consumers (Spaulding, 2010). In fact, in this environment, consumers can be exposed to more social and collaborative online shopping experiences to aggregate collective intelligence to better understand purchasing and support more accurate shopping decisions (Dennison et al., 2009). Online merchants can help them to better serve their customers by identifying consumer behavior, preferences and expectations (Constantinides et al., 2008). Unlike traditional e-commerce, which focuses on improving the efficiency of online shopping, social commerce offers a rich social, interactive and collaborative online shopping experience (Yang et al., 2015). In this way, e-commerce moves to a consumer-centered environment aimed at creating new business opportunities (Yang et al., 2015), increasing consumer participation (Guo & Barnes, 2011) (Sadovykh et al., 2015), support product and brand development (Huang et al., 2012).
Research on social media and Web 2.0 related to the context of e-commerce (Hajli, 2014) and to their impacts on consumers (Kim & Park, 2013) including their attitudes (Hassanein & Head, 2007), levels of satisfaction (Bai et al., 2008), and shopping behaviors (Seckler et al., 2015) emphasize the importance of designing quality social commerce websites (Hernández et al., 2009). In fact, website design has a significant impact on consumer interaction with social commerce (Cebi, 2013). Consumer purchase intentions, in particular, are heavily influenced by the quality of the social commerce website design (Curty & Zhang, 2013).