Navigating the Social Shift: A Preliminary Study of Consumer Behavior on Malaysia's Social Commerce Platforms

The proliferation of online businesses coupled with the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) has led to the emergence of social commerce. The integration of social media platforms into e-commerce offers businesses a convenient avenue for engaging with consumers and a novel method for capturing additional sales volume. This seamless integration of social media platforms into current e-commerce practices has significantly increased its success. Research on the factors that affect purchase intentions in social commerce is still sparse, especially in the context of Malaysian consumers. In general, the causal model of purchase intentions on social commerce in this study aims to investigate the impact of the constructs of visibility and metavoicing on purchase intentions among Malaysian millennial consumers. Henceforth, this initial study specifically aims to evaluate the reliability and validity of the IT affordance constructs of visibility and metavoicing through rigorous assessments. At the items-construct level, the internal consistency assessment was conducted using McDonald’s Omega, which is known for its robustness in measuring the reliability of multi-item constructs. At the construct level, discriminant validity and the strength of linear relationships among variables were assessed using Pearson correlation analysis. The pilot dataset gathered was analyzed with SPSS 29, and the results have validated that the predictive model achieved high levels of reliability and validity at both the item and construct levels. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that the independent variables, metavoicing and visibility, have a significant association with purchase intentions, underscoring their importance in understanding consumer behavior.