IT Affordances and Social Commerce: Used Product Marketplace

Abstract

The e-commerce market continues to grow, and as more and more information is available to consumers, the way they interact with technology is changing. Various online social commerce (OSC) platforms are available to users, such as WeChat and Facebook. Our study focuses on Facebook and, more specifically, Facebook Marketplace which is most often used for resale of pre-owned products. According to CNET, in 2018, Facebook Marketplace was being used in 70 countries, by 800 million people monthly. (Al-Heeti, 2018; Mac, 2017). Our study aims to measure IT affordance in Facebook Marketplace and how affordance created by the interaction of users and platform features promote purchase intention and seller’s sale intention. We aim to develop an IT affordance measure based on the framework by Rice et al. (2017). We will create new seller-side IT affordance measures and build on and contextualize the measures by Ünlüsoy et al. (2021), Dong, Wang & Benbasat (2016), and Boyd (2010) for buyer side affordance. Furthermore, we will use IT affordance to understand the role of various platform features and how they impact purchase intention and seller sale intention. There have been attempts to develop IT affordance constructs for OSC in the literature, but they are not suited to Facebook Marketplace. Some of the constructs do not apply as different features on other platforms are not generalizable. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, the IS affordance literature has only focused on the buyer and not the seller or their interactions. Furthermore, the measures have not focused on OSC platforms for pre-owned products where most users are not professional sellers but occasionally sell various used products locally.

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