To Give or Not to Give? An Exploratory Study of User Beliefs Influencing Adoption of Facebook Gifts

Social commerce is a growing trend in practice and an important area of research, yet there have been few studies exploring social commerce in the context of social networking sites. This study begins to address this gap in research by identifying salient user beliefs influencing the intention to use a gift-giving service on a social networking site. The recently launched Facebook Gifts service provides a real-world context for the study. We explore the factorial structure of salient user beliefs and examine the relationships between the beliefs and the intention to use Facebook Gifts within a broader nomological network. The implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed.