Antecedents to Customer Repurchase in Korean Social Commerce Service

Recently, with the success of Groupon in the USA using the new business model referred to as social commerce, which is a commercial transaction involving group purchases on social network service (SNS), social commerce business receives much attention. Social commerce is capable of effectively promoting additional purchasing by customers through unprecedented price discounts and limiting the number of purchasers and time allotted for purchases, and is able to achieve promotional effects over and above those of simple product promotion due to customers' voluntary word of mouth. Although social commerce is effective for short-term increase in the sales of products, there are numerous dissenting opinions on whether it can promote repurchasing by customers. In particular, social commerce in Korea focuses only on unprecedented discounted prices and does not have the marketing effect that SNS can produce over and above the sales promotion. The objective of this study is to find the factors that influence the repurchase intention on social commerce and to analyze factors that contribute the social commerce product. For this, this study extracts repurchase intention factors and computes a repurchase probability to assess the influence of factors other than price discount on social commerce customers at the time of repurchasing. In addition, the importance of factors toward sales revenue for each of the social commerce products (e.g., restaurant/café, beauty, tour/leisure, show/exhibition, and fashion/clothes) is estimated by using the computed repurchase probabilities. The repurchase probability through the analysis can be used for development of social commerce business in Korea.