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Top1. Introduction
Several electronic commerce platforms emphasizing transactions as the primary construct have been studied, but Social Commerce (SC) uses different approaches such as social experience and social technology as the central aspect to support commercial activity. Literally, the SC platform refers to the use of the third party of Social Networking Service (SNS) technology to establish social interaction and experience required to support transactions by providing the information needed for commercial decisions (Handarkho, 2020b). Due to the inexpensive and easy operation and maintenance, many sellers in the emerging market, including Indonesia, are using SC to elevate competitive advantage in the online market (Greenhouse, 2019). This is also associated with the fact that, in Indonesia, SNS has already become the primary source of information for online commercial activity (Snapcart, 2018). Through this online platform, Indonesian sellers expedite social interaction with and among their customers by posting content and information related to their product and allow them to participate in the related discussion by sharing their review or opinion toward the product or service experience. SC facilitates users to retrieve and share information and knowledge related to product and service from a specific seller through discussion, review, and social interaction with each other and even with the seller (Esmaeili & Hashemi, 2019). Hence, the platform focuses primarily on social experience, while the transaction aspect is secondary (Lu et al., 2016).
Topics related to customer intention to use SC have been explored from several aspects to have a deep understanding concerning the adoption of the platform. However, due to the placement of social experience as a primary focus, it is also essential to explore and analyze the effects of consumers' personal characteristics in the intention to use SC mainly because of their influence on the behavior of users to interact in an online environment (Benson et al., 2019). Moreover, Pagani and Mirabello (2011) also reported there is a possibility the activeness or passiveness of users in their engagement towards an online platform depends on some personal attributes, which, according to Shanmugam et al. (2016), also affected by a social experience they face in the SC. This further strengthens the need to observe the effect of social experience and personal characteristics concerning the intention to involve in social interaction (Alhulail et al., 2019), which, according to Handarkho (2020b), is the primary focus of SC. This study, therefore, tries to highlight and point out the importance of the observation towards the ability of the social experience in SC to induce personal characteristics of Indonesian consumers with respect to their intention to use the platform.
Even though previous literature has addressed social commerce intention from the Personal and Social Experience perspectives, a study that explores explicitly the influence of social experience on the personal element attached to individuals concerning their intention to use SC is still missing. According to Handarkho (2020c), user adoption in SC is mainly affected by community interactions in the platform, which makes the observation on the influence of social interaction aspects toward individual personal in SC adoption cannot be neglected. Therefore, it is considered as a gap that tries to be filled by this research.