Purpose

Following the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, social commerce has been viewed as an inseparable part of today’s business environment. Social commerce is a recent version of e-commerce, which has rapidly become a new interesting field for both practitioners and academics. To improve social commerce success, managers should be aware of what encompasses social commerce quality, how consumers sense it and how it is assessed. Though, despite the importance of social commerce, designing of scales for measuring the social commerce quality has rarely been explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a new scale for measuring the social commerce service quality comprehensively.

Design/methodology/approach

To obtain the research objective, in the first step, a comprehensive literature review along with focus group discussions was conducted to theoretically conceptualize service quality dimensions and measures. Then, for evaluating the proposed scale via social commerce customers, the survey method was used. Finally, the verified measures were weighted and ranked using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process.

Findings

The findings showed that social commerce service quality is a hierarchical and multidimensional construct consisting of six key dimensions including information quality, social interaction quality, design quality, functional quality, social trust/security and social support.

Research limitations/implications

The study results assist managers to improve the quality of social commerce services through increasing the awareness of customers’ perceptions and expectations concerning social service quality. They further help managers to understand systematically all dimensions of social commerce service quality, which may lead to reduce the risk of social commerce adaptation failure and consequently increase the customers’ satisfaction.

Originality/value

The role of service quality in acceptance and success of social commerce has been emphasized by many academics and practitioners. However, review of the previous literature shows that inadequate studies in this field have been conducted so far. The main contribution of this study is conceptualization and development of a validated scale for measuring the social commerce service quality. This scale provides a useful instrument for researchers who wish to measure the service quality of social commerce and for managers who want to improve the perceived quality of their services.

中文翻译：

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开发社交商务服务质量量表：一项探索性研究

目的

随着 Web 2.0 技术的出现，社交商务被视为当今商业环境不可分割的一部分。社交商务是电子商务的最新版本，它已迅速成为从业者和学者都感兴趣的新领域。为了提高社交商务的成功率，管理人员应该了解社交商务质量包括哪些内容、消费者如何感知它以及如何对其进行评估。尽管如此，尽管社交商务很重要，但很少有人探索设计用于衡量社交商务质量的量表。因此，本研究的目的是开发一种新的量表来综合衡量社交商务服务质量。

设计/方法/方法

为了获得研究目标，第一步，进行了全面的文献回顾和焦点小组讨论，以从理论上将服务质量维度和措施概念化。然后，为了通过社交商务客户评估建议的量表，使用了调查方法。最后，使用模糊层次分析法对验证的措施进行加权和排序。

发现

研究结果表明，社交商务服务质量是一个分层的、多维的结构，由六个关键维度组成，包括信息质量、社交互动质量、设计质量、功能质量、社会信任/安全和社会支持。

研究限制/影响

研究结果有助于管理者通过提高客户对社会服务质量的看法和期望的认识来提高社会商务服务的质量。它们进一步帮助管理者系统地了解社交商务服务质量的各个维度，从而可以降低社交商务适应失败的风险，从而提高客户的满意度。

原创性/价值

许多学者和从业者都强调了服务质量在社交商务的接受和成功中的作用。然而，回顾以往的文献表明，迄今为止，该领域的研究还不够充分。本研究的主要贡献是概念化和开发用于衡量社交商务服务质量的有效量表。该量表为希望衡量社交商务服务质量的研究人员和希望提高其服务感知质量的管理人员提供了一种有用的工具。