Traffic transfer between social media and E-commerce platform: the role of social media affordances

ABSTRACT

The traffic transfer between social media and E-commerce platforms is essential to the retailers in the E-commerce platform and the platform itself. Drawing on the affordance theory, this study presents the results from three experiments based on two kinds of social media (with or without E-commerce widow) to demonstrate the role of social media recommendation pages’ affordance on the visitors’ usage and sharing intention to the product link attached to the content. The result shows that traffic transfer exists between social media and E-commerce platforms. Moreover, the higher the level of social media affordances (visibility, editability, persistence, association), the higher the willingness of visitors to transfer from social media to E-commerce platforms. This change in traffic volume is mediated by the visitors’ relationship strength and perceived trust in the blogger and the platform. This study expands the research on affordance theory to the area of traffic transfer. Additionally, this study has also enriched the existing literature on cross-platform traffic imports in social E-commerce. The results will guide both content operators and retailers who wish to use social media to increase sales.

KEYWORDS:

• Traffic transfer
• relation strength
• social media
• affordance
• perceived trust

Acknowledgment

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: National Natural Science Foundation of China (72272045, 71831005).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with animal participants performed by any of the authors. And in our experiment, there is no existence of the participants’ rights, all participants were paid the same amount as their labour.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The purpose of Taguchi orthogonal array design is using orthogonal tables to select experimental parameters and arrange experiments, evaluating multiple factors that affect experimental results with fewer parameter combinations.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (72272045, 71831005).