Alike but Apart: Tie Decay in Social Commerce

Ties between users play a fundamental role in the operation of social commerce, allowing product information to diffuse from sellers to (indirectly connected) customers. However, social commerce ties are mainly formed based on customers’ interests in products, rendering them fragile. This study investigates the impacts of sellers’ promotional activities on the decay of ties in social commerce. Drawing on utility theory, we posit an inverted U-shaped relationship between the alignment of sellers’ promotions with customers’ interests and tie strength due to customers’ trade-off between surprise and fit in their consumption of product information. Moreover, we argue that the interest alignment effect is reinforced by multiple promotions (i.e., promotion count), flattening the nonlinearity of the inverted U-shaped impact and pushing the turning point to the right. We confirm these arguments via dyadic empirical analyses of a large Chinese social commerce website. The results inform social commerce practitioners of what is central to success and offer significant theoretical implications.