Abstract:
Advances in electronic service technology have created great opportunities as
well as threats to organizations in various business and services sectors. As such
businesses, either willingly or reluctantly, are increasingly embracing the Internet as
distribution channel in order to remain competitive or gain market share. With
particular reference to e-services, absence of accurate information on factors that have
influenced users' behavior to adopt or use e-services could mislead an organization
into adopting unhelpful solutions as it strives to accelerate the implementation of e services. Social commerce which entails all sorts of social services via electronic
systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is relatively still a new form
of transacting business. Evidence now suggests that consumers often hesitate to
transact with Web-based vendors because of uncertainty about vendor behavior or the
perceived risk of having personal information stolen by hackers. Trust plays a central
role in helping consumers overcome perceptions of risk and insecurity. Trust makes
consumers comfortable sharing personal information, making purchases, and acting
on Web vendor advice—behaviors essential to widespread adoption of online
transaction. Therefore, trust is critical to both researchers and practitioners. Prior
research on trust has used diverse, incomplete, and inconsistent definitions of trust,
making it difficult to compare results across studies.
This thesis reports the use of social commerce amongst the student of the
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, its prevalence, and factors
influencing the adoption. This thesis found out that social commerce utilization is poor
amongst the student even though they are aware of it, and it is recommended that
company’s providing goods and services via the Internet should ensure a security
mechanism which will hinder fraudsters from having access to sensitive information
that is sent while online transaction is taking place. In this way, consumer trust in
social commerce will increase thereby leading to a major adoption of the medium for
transacting business
