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Top1. Introduction
Nowadays, social media is becoming a part of our lifestyle. Social commerce (s-commerce), as one of the newest electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications over the social media, is starting to attract the attention of researchers and numerous studies have been carried out, covering s-commerce from different perspectives (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013; Liang et al., 2011). It is different from the traditional e-commerce in many factors and it has many different characteristics, too. Actually, the introduction of Web 2.0 and the social networking applications enabled s-commerce to emerge as a new type of e-commerce (Momani et al., 2018). S-commerce represents the benefiting from the social networks to enhance the e-commerce by adopting some new activities to the online shopping process, in order to make it more social and acceptable by users (Gatautis and Medziausiene, 2014). S-commerce seems to be an enjoyable alternative to the traditional way of online shopping, because of the revolutionary communicating features offered to the consumers. As mentioned by Momani et al. (2017), social media communication and interaction tools make the online shopping more enjoyable, and as a result, it will increase the level of acceptance, as well as, the satisfaction of the process.
Therefore, the up growing problem is that this acceptance needs to be assessed in order to explore and evaluate the degree of consumers’ acceptance and satisfaction to this new technology. The proposed solution is to apply one of the technology acceptance theories in order to assess the ability for the proposed research population (Jordanians) to adopt such kind of technology (s-commerce) within their usage behavior (online shopping). Actually, this field of software engineering has a long history and strong relation with the psychological and sociological sciences since the beginning of the twentieth century (Momani and Jamous, 2017). This study aims to investigate the ability of the Jordanian society to adopt s-commerce and their acceptance of using their social media accounts to perform their online shopping activities. Accordingly, this research revised the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), as one of the most developed and intensive technology acceptance theories (Momani, 2020).
In general, the majority of the technology acceptance theories and models in their original frameworks did not design for this kind of technologies, because these theories were designed originally to explain the usage behavior and assess the acceptance of adopting information systems in organizations within the mandatory style of usage, while s-commerce is a web-based, social-commercial, and voluntary-usage application. UTAUT model was developed to test the acceptance of applying new technologies in organizations and firms within a mandatory style of usage depending on western working environment and culture (Venkatesh et al., 2003). It is worth to mention here that UTAUT model got a revision and update by its developers in the form of the extended UTAUT (UTAUT2) (Venkatesh et al., 2012). While the UTAUT2 seems to be more applicable to study this kind of technologies, one of the contributions of this study is investigate and examine the UTAUT model in context of voluntary style of usage and its viability after extension and modification. As mentioned by Venkatesh et al. (2012), UTAUT2 can explain from 52% to 74% of the variance in behavioral intention an usage behavior. This study would examine the applity of the UTAUT in the same condition.
The purpose of this study is to examine the ability of the UTAUT model to be applied over a social and commercial application within a voluntary style of usage for a non-western culture, such as the Jordanian society, whereas 34.1% of the society having their own accounts on Facebook (ASMR, 2012), which is the most common social network within the Jordanians. This requires the necessity to study the Jordanian consumers’ behaviors and their needs depending on their culture, in addition to their ability to adopt this kind of development on the typical e-commercial way that they already know. It is important to know that this research is possible to be circulated over any Arab, Middle-eastern, or developing country which all share almost the same features in their needs and online shopping behaviors.
Accordingly, this study would modify the UTUAT model by adding some new factors and removing some others and redefining the relations between these factors. That will make it more suitable to test the acceptance of s-commerce adoption within the Jordanians depending on their behavioral intention and usage behavior of online shopping by using their accounts on social networks.