Touch Before You Buy: Risk, Identity, and Social Influence in Chinese Social Commerce

Sammanfattning

Background: Social commerce environments, defined by the integration of social media functionalities within transactional platforms, have fundamentally altered the conditions under which consumers make purchasing decisions. In the Chinese context, platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Taobao Live compress discovery, evaluation, and purchase into real-time, socially embedded interactions where peer endorsements, influencer demonstrations, and algorithmic curation operate simultaneously. While the social commerce literature has produced substantial empirical work on purchase intention and platform adoption, the dominant paradigm remains quantitative and transactional in focus, systematically excluding the processual, experiential, and interpretive dimensions of consumer decision-making. High-involvement product categories such as furniture, characterised by significant financial investment, tactile complexity, and deep symbolic significance, remain almost entirely absent from this literature. The conditions under which social commerce environments shape decision-making in high-involvement, identity-relevant consumption contexts have not been empirically examined, leaving a theoretical gap at the intersection of perceived risk, social influence, and consumer identity research. Purpose: This thesis examines how the social commerce environment on Chinese social media platforms shapes the decision-making processes of furniture purchasing among Millennial and Generation Z consumers, where existing frameworks developed for lowinvolvement and transactional contexts cannot fully account for the risk interpretation, social influence negotiation, and identity dynamics that high-involvement decisions entail. Using 20 semi-structured interviews with Millennial and Generation Z consumers in China who had purchased furniture through social commerce platforms, the study investigates three interconnected dimensions: how perceived risk is constructed and resolved within a digitalphysical divide, how social influence operates through two structurally distinct architectures, and how identity and symbolic risk shape and intensify the decision process. The study contributes to the social commerce, perceived risk, and social influence literatures by providing an empirically grounded, process-oriented account of high-involvement consumer decision-making in socially embedded digital environments. Method: This study adopts a qualitative, interpretivist research design grounded in a constructionist ontology and abductive reasoning. Data was collected through 20 semistructured interviews with Millennial and Generation Z consumers across multiple Chinese cities, conducted in March 2026 via video call. Interviews were conducted primarily in Mandarin Chinese and translated in full prior to analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke (2006, 2019) was employed as the analytical method, generating three higher-order themes through an iterative process combining deductive S–O–R sensitizing codes with inductively generated codes drawn from participants' own language and experience. Conclusion: The findings establish that Millennial and Generation Z consumers navigate furniture purchasing in Chinese social commerce through three analytically distinct but interconnected processes. First, the universal experience of a digital-physical risk gap generates dimension-specific coping strategies, including adversarial platform intelligence and an offline bridge to physical retail, that challenge the assumption of a self-contained digital decision environment. Second, social influence operates through a dual architecture in which platformmediated influence is strategically resisted while offline relational influence is genuinely authoritative, identifying active resistance as an empirically grounded fourth mode of social influence processing absent from existing typologies. Third, furniture's status as an extended self-object intensifies all other perceived risk dimensions by adding symbolic and identity stakes to functional and aesthetic concerns. The study contributes an empirically derived understanding of how replenishment structure performance depends on the operational conditions in which it is implemented: social commerce functions as a discovery and research tool for high-involvement consumers, not as a decisive decision environment, a finding that neither perceived risk, social influence, nor extended self theory, taken individually, was equipped to produce.