| Article ID: | iaor20111505 |
| Volume: | 20 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 118 |
| End Page Number: | 132 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2011 |
| Journal: | European Journal of Information Systems |
| Authors: | Wakefield Robin L, Wakefield Kirk L, Baker Julie, Wang Liz C |
| Keywords: | social, internet, behaviour, e-commerce |
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.