How User-Generated Content Characteristics Influence the Impulsive Consumption: Moderating Effect of Tie Strength

In recent years, with the continuous integrative development of e-commerce and social media, social commerce, as a trust-centered social transaction mode, has become an important performance form of e-commerce. The good experience of online community and abundant user-generated content (UGC) attract more and more users and businesses to participate in the community contribution. In this context, the cost of accessing information is continuously decreasing, which not only makes the purchase process more concise and efficient, but also greatly increases the possibility of consumers’ impulsive consumption. However, there are very few empirical studies on the internal influencing mechanism of consumers’ impulsive consumption based on the characteristics of UGC for social commerce. In view of this, based on S-O-R model, this study constructs a model of consumers’ impulsive consumption in the context of social commerce from the characteristics of UGC, with perceived risk as the mediating variable and tie strength as the moderating variable. The results show that content authenticity, content usefulness, and content valence of UGC have significant negative impacts on consumers’ risk perception in the process of purchase decision-making, and consumers’ perceived risk has a significant negative impact on consumers’ impulsive consumption. Meanwhile, the tie strength between UGC producer and UGC receiver plays a moderating role between content usefulness and perceived risk, as well as between perceived risk and impulsive consumption. Finally, combined with the above findings, this study provides effective suggestions for relevant participants in social commerce in terms of business management.