Facebook C2C social commerce: A study of online impulse buying

Facebook users are increasingly using the site to conduct commercial activities, by posting advertisements in groups and then buying or selling items from each other. This type of group is called as a C2C Facebook “buy and sell” group in the current work. Drawing from latent state–trait theory, heuristic information processing, and observational learning, we conducted an online field experiment to empirically investigate the effect of the information quality of the advertisement, the trait of the impulsiveness, and the number of “likes” it receives on consumers' urge to buy impulsively. The findings and implications of our study are discussed in the paper.